Sir Arnold Bax (1883-1953)
Spring Fire – Complete Music for Cello and Piano
Folk-Tale for cello and piano (1918)
Sonata for cello and piano (1923)
Sonatina for cello and piano (1933)
Legend-Sonata for cello and piano (1943)
Alexander Baillie (cello)
John Thwaites (piano)
rec. 2022/23, The Bradshaw Hall, Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, UK
SOMM Recordings SOMMCD0704 [80]
Sir Arnold Bax remains a paradoxical and elusive character as man and composer. In public someone who seemed diffident to the point of social awkwardness with little or no desire to be in any kind of social or professional spotlight yet the Art he created – musical and poetic tells a completely different story. Here is someone writing the most ardently passionate and Romantic music, deeply felt and unequivocally expressed deep into the 20th Century.
The substantial works Bax wrote for cello and piano embody this artistic creed revealing the complexity of both technical composition and emotional range. A cause for celebration then to hear these impressive – but elusive – works in such convincing performances by cellist Alexander Baillie and his colleague collaborator of more than forty years, pianist John Thwaites. Thwaites also contributes the excellent and insightful liner note. Part of the reason that these cello works are a useful touchstone for Bax’s compositional career is their disposition across it. Sensibly, SOMM have organised the programme by date of composition so aside from the smaller-scale Folk-Tale of 1918 the three main works each mark a decade in Bax’s life. The Sonata for Cello and Piano dates from 1923, the Sonatina from 1933 and the Legend-Sonata from 1943. The accidently neat ordering stretches back a decade too with thematic material for the sonata being mined from the remarkable orchestral Spring Fire of 1913 – the link that gives this disc its title and inspires the attractive cover art by Christel Baillie. By 1953 Bax was dead.
These decade apart ‘waymarkers’ are of significant interest for the listener interested – intoxicated even – by Bax’s soundworld as they show both his evolution as a composer but also how he stayed true to the same spirit that evoked across the decades of a rapidly changing world. So all three works are very clearly derived from the same musical vocabulary and aesthetic even if the mode of expression changes and is refined. In Alexander Baillie and John Thwaites the listener has two brilliantly sensitive and skilled performers ideally suited to the elusive range and visionary nature of these scores. Over the years Bax’s music has been well-served by various labels with Chandos and Naxos pre-eminent. Curiously, neither has recorded these works in a complete recital as here. Paul Watkins’ various collections of British Cello Sonatas for Chandos have only included the 1923 Sonata while Naxos programmed Folk Tale with Antony Ingham and Gerald Peregrine in a collection of British miniatures for cello and piano. You have to go back as far as 1994 for an identical/complete collection on ASV played by Bernard Gregor-Smith and Yolande Wrigley. In 2012 Lionel Handy produced a disc where the Sonata [which he included 5 years later in a Lyrita recital] was substituted for the remarkable solo Rhapsodic Ballad. Given that ASV is now defunct and Handy’s “Sleeveless Records” label seems moribund at best, this SOMM disc pretty much has the field to itself if collectors new to this music are looking for a recording.
Baillie is now in his late sixties but he plays with all the technical assurance, authority and experience a long career brings. Perhaps Gregor-Smith emphasises the more sinewy, muscular aspects of Bax’s writing whereas Baillie is more pensive and lyrical. Not to say he is not equally impressive in the heavy stamping music that Bax often writes but overall – as the timings suggest – these are broader and expressive interpretations. In part this is aided by the warm supportive acoustic of the Bradshaw Hall in Birmingham. Interestingly, Gregor-Smith is slower in the slow movements of both the Sonatina and the Legend-Sonata [Handy is slower still here]but in every other movement Baillie paints a broader canvas. I have to say I find all three performances to be powerful and effective from all the players involved but just possibly this new SOMM recording is the most completely compelling with the best balance between energy and reflection. John Thwaites has hosted Bax festivals and clearly his understanding of Bax’s complex idiom – especially in the very demanding keyboard writing is evident throughout.
As mentioned earlier, Bax used thematic material from Spring Fire for the opening of the slow movement of the Sonata. In the liner Thwaites suggests that this genuinely beautiful music was repurposed because Bax believed the unperformed Spring Fire “would never be heard in his lifetime”. My sense is not that the earlier score would not be played but rather that Bax himself had moved on creatively. Spring Fire remains Bax’s most luxuriant score and the one most clearly influenced by Diaghilev and Impressionism. Bax always wrote for large orchestral groups but the sound of the earlier score is quite different from the craggier music that typified the Post-War works. But re-encountering the music as used in the Sonata does reveal one of Bax’s most rapturous creations and Baillie/Thwaites capture that visionary sense quite beautifully. The sonata was first performed by Beatrice Harrison [an inspiration for many British composers at this time] accompanied by Bax’s great muse Harriet Cohen and it was written in the high-noon of Bax’s creative flood. So there can be no sense that he trawled the earlier work due to lack of inspiration and indeed this sonata remains – in length terms – Bax’s most substantial work in sonata form. Baillie’s performance runs to 33:21 which makes it longer than any of the four piano sonatas and just longer than the first of the three violin sonatas. But what is not in doubt is the sense of confident ambition and scale the work strives for which again typifies many of Bax’s scores from this period.
The 1933 Sonatina is much more compact [13:07] both is scale but also emotional goals. Bax’s writing is neither as dense or intense but again Baillie and Thwaites find exactly the right emotional weight for the work. Whereas the Sonata was written between the 1st and 2nd Symphonies, the Sonatina lies between Nos. 5 and 6 – two genuine masterpieces so this reduction in scale was clearly an intention not a symptom of creative decline. Here the dedication was to Casals although he never played the work. All three performances are again very good if subtly different; Baillie now more assertive, Gregor-Smith more playful and Handy rhythmically freer. From all the performances the work emerges as a little – probably underappreciated – gem and one that in its careful control of form and scale quite belies the lazy criticism of Bax’s music being formless or meandering. Indeed there is a lightness of touch both in the actual writing and the expressive goals that is quite different from many of Bax’s major, more fraught or brooding scores – if the “unashamed Romantic” Bax ever dallied with the fringes of neo-classicism, this is about as close as he got. Perhaps Bax is not the first composer to undermine the value of a work by giving it a diminutive title. Apparently at the first performance it was simply called Sonata in D – certainly it deserves to be better known and appreciated in its own right.
By 1943 the fires of inspiration were burning far lower. This last decade of Bax’s life are marked by few scores of any great scale. Graham Parlett’s definitive catalogue lists just 35 works in the full decade – most of which were small scale (church choral works, royal commissions) or re-workings. The two film scores are larger scale but effortful. This is the period when Bax, living over a pub in Storrington, himself said he wanted to retire “like a grocer.” In the midst of this creative miasma, the Legend-Sonata rather stands out as Bax’s last fluent genuinely Romantic score. In a programme note for the first performance Bax said; “I wrote it with so much hope for a better world.” Cellist Florence Hooton was dedicatee and first performer again alongside Harriet Cohen. Hooton recorded the work on Lyrita and was also Handy’s teacher. For all the historical value of her recording there are technical limitations in that performance that allow only a qualified welcome. No such concerns of course with Baillie and Thwaites. The very open bars plunge back into the dynamic energetic world of previous Bax scores. The Legend of the title is unspecified but clearly Bax is looking back to those sources of inspiration that defined so many of his scores in the 20’s and 30’s. There is a nostalgic quality that Baillie captures particularly well – even if this seems out of step with the political and musical world of the early 1940’s. This sense of loss and yearning is most explicitly expressed in the central Lento Espressivo where the piano first quotes “Fand’s song of Immortal love” from the 1916 Garden of Fand – by chance the very last music of his Bax would hear before his death. He also cited this work in a 1947 interview as his favourite. That being the case its use in this sonata must surely have extra-musical resonance. Again direct comparison between the three versions is interesting; Baillie the most Romantic, Gregor-Smith touchingly inward while Handy the most objective. All three are wholly convincing and effective. I did find myself wondering if Bax’s “hope for a better world” was more rooted in the nostalgic, magical past rather than the expectation of a truly Brave New World in the future.
For no good reason, the cello works are the ones I visit least often amongst Bax’s chamber output but this new disc has prompted to return to – and enjoy a lot – all of the music and performances offered here. This is one of those happy situations where one can say that all of the modern versions on offer (I have not heard the performance of the Legend-Sonata on Hänssler played by Johannes Moser – a lovely mixed recital well received I recall) bring fine musicianship and genuine insights. If this new disc goes to the top of the list it is simply because of the top notch quality of every aspect of this release and the benefit of availability.
Nick Barnard
Previous review: John France (June 2025)
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