Release Date: 04 January 2006
Label: Naxos - Ex Select Products / Naxos Classics
Packaging Type: Jewel Case
No of Units: 1
Barcode: 747313269822
Genres: Classical
Composer/Series: BAX
Description
Arnold Bax (1883-1953) Clarinet Sonatas Piano Trio Trio in One Movement Arnold Bax came to maturity in the years immediately before the First World War and over the next thirty-odd years produced a significant body of music in most forms except opera. In his late teens and early twenties, however, while still a student at London's Royal Academy of Music, he had produced a variety of chamber works, suppressed in Bax's lifetime, including several works for clarinet, presumably written for a fellow student, though we have not been able to identify who the student may have been. When Arnold Bax enrolled at the Royal Academy of Music in the autumn of 1900 shortly before his 17th birthday, he did so as a pianist as well as an intending composer, and in his earliest compositions, all indicators of his quickly growing technique, his complex piano parts document a rapidly growing capability. He was soon renowned for playing full orchestral scores as sight, and as well as Wagner he explored the latest developments, including the piano music of Scriabin and Debussy. Bax soaked up every influence he came upon at concerts at London's Queen's Hall where Henry Wood's taste for the latest Russian novelty was meat and drink to him. In comparison with some of his contemporaries at the Royal Academy, notably York Bowen and Benjamin Dale, both of whom achieved early celebrity as composers and performers, Bax was a slow developer, only gradually becoming known as a composer, with songs and the occasional orchestral work. To his friends Bax adopted the stance of not caring for performance, though all seem to have thought him brilliant. In fact when he achieved his mature style and came into his ascendancy he was quickly regarded as one of the leading British composers. Between the wars the competing names from his student years became less and less well-regarded in comparison. Bax was thus celebrated for his tone poems, symphonies and concertos, his piano music and a variety of chamber music including a popular String Quartet in G, the first of three, and an Oboe Quintet which was widely played. Among the works for which he became celebrated was the Clarinet Sonata of 1934 which became one of his most frequently played works. Immediately after the Second World War he produced his final chamber work, the late Piano Trio in B flat, written in response to a request from his friend the pianist Harry Isaacs for his trio. The following notes on the music recorded on this CD are presented in chronological order of composition. They fall into three groups: student works here revived and recorded for the first time; one from his middle period (Folk-Tale) and two later works written by Bax in his fifties and sixties. In his autobiography Farewell, My Youth, Bax describes an academy friend of his: 'one George [Allaby] Alder, a horn-player, a wag of no mean order, and well acquainted since boyhood with Elgar'. Alder lived in Malvern, and when Bax visited him, Alder
Tracklisting
Dariia Lytvishko
Baltimore Symphony Orchestra; Marin Alsop
Alice Di Piazza; Basel Sinfonietta; NDR Bigband; Titus Engel
Anna Alas i Jove; Miquel Villalba
David Childs; Black Dyke Band; Nicholas Childs
Yaqi Yang; Margarita Parsamyan; Robynne Redmon; Minghao Liu; Frank Ragsdale; Kim Josephson; Kevin S
Vilmos Csikos; Olivier Lechardeur; Manon Lamaison
Tomas Cotik; Martingale Ensemble; Ken Selden
