Release Date: 06 January 2000
Label: Naxos - Ex Select Products / Naxos Classics
Packaging Type: Jewel Case
No of Units: 1
Barcode: 636943450727
Genres: Classical
Composer/Series: BAX
Description
Arnold Bax (1883-1953)Chamber MusicArnold Bax was the elder son of a well-off non-conformist family fromsouth London, whose early signs of musical talent were encouraged by asympathetic and over-protective mother. (Similarly encouraged, Bax's brother Cliffordbecame a well-known writer and playwright.) Bax was born in Streatham, and ashe remarked "I cherish a fancy - or delusion - that Streatham in the'eighties was still Surrey... hazily I do recall a certain mellowness andport-windiness about some of the older streets". Yet his mostimpressionable years, in his teens, were spent in Hampstead, where his familymoved in 1896, his father buying an imposing mansion, Ivybank, set in three anda half acres. To all intents and purposes it was a country house existence,Hampstead still being semi-rural.Bax was a student at the Royal Academy of Music from 1900 to 1905 andthen, having a private income, he was free to develop his musical career as thewhim took him. He was eager to throw off constraining parental influence, andadopted a semi-bohemian lifestyle, travelling widely, including to the Germancity of Dresden and Russia. His favourite destination was the west coast ofIreland, where, as he put it, 'lorded by the Atlantic' and under the influenceof the early poetry of Yeats, he discovered the village of Glencolumcille inDonegal, a place to which, until the First World War, he constantly returned.Bax imbibed all things Irish, wrote poetry, short stories and Synge-likeplays, using the pseudonym of 'Dermot O'Byrne', and learned Irish Gaelic. Whenin Dublin he moved in literary and nationalist circles, and his friendsincluded the poet and writer Padraic Colum, founder of the Irish Review, andPadraig Pearse, champion of the Irish language who was executed after theEaster Rising in 1916. It was the Easter Rising which was the divide in Bax'slife; the shocking unexpected event that brought him face to face with aharsher reality. There is no doubt that the Elegiac Trio writtenimmediately after Easter 1916 celebrated a world that was lost, but in a sensethe later works with harp - the harp being, perhaps, a symbol of Ireland - hadthis function too.The earliest work in the present programme is the Elegiac Trio, whichBax wrote for the same combination as Debussy's Sonata for Flute, Violaand Harp, and at about the same time. The first performance was atLondon's Aeolian Hall on 26th March 1917, when the performers were thecelebrated flautist Albert Fransella, the composer Waldo Warner on viola, and theharpist Miriam Timothy. The Debussy sonata was actually written six monthsbefore Bax's score, but it is difficult to see how Bax could have beeninfluenced by it, despite textural similarities, for the Debussy was firstheard six months after Bax completed his score and was not given a publicperformance in London until six weeks before the first performance of Bax'strio, when the performers were the same artists.For a memorial piece written so soon after the event, Bax does
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
