Sir Arnold Bax (1883-1953)
The Blessed Damozel
Jeremy Huw Williams (baritone), Paula Fan (piano), Theodore Buchholz (cello)
rec. 2022, Jeffrey Haskell Recording Studio, University of Arizona, USA
EM Records EMRCD086 [85]

The revival of the fortunes of Sir Arnold Bax on record during the last half century seem to have largely neglected his output of songs, although he appears to have penned around 125 compositions in this category. This may well be because many of his essays in the field are early works, with relatively few dating from the period of his greatest reputation as a symphonist and composer of symphonic poems; of the eighteen items included in this recital, eleven date from the period before 1920 and five predate the First World War.

This is the second disc devoted to Bax’s songs produced by the combination of Jeremy Huw Williams and the late Paula Fan, and the earlier one was subtitled “the forgotten songs of Arnold Bax” – so it is perhaps surprising that only two of the tracks on this CD are claimed by EM Records as world première recordings.

Mind you, the selection of The Blessed Damozel, the earliest and most substantial setting in this recital, as the title track of this release is extremely valuable quite apart from the fact that the work has not been recorded before. It is an example of a melodrama, a work written for spoken voice with piano accompaniment in a genre that was once highly fashionable (the booklet note by Lewis Foreman draws a parallel to Richard Strauss’s Enoch Arden) but fell into almost total disfavour during the earlier decades of the twentieth century – perhaps because of the relative difficulties of obtaining a satisfactory result from the combination of forces, which was designed for domestic circumstances of performance rather than the larger acoustic of the concert hall where professional artists would be featured. Unlike the Strauss example, Bax seems to have been very particular about the matching of the spoken words to the music; the line describing “the void, as low as where this earth spins like a fretful midge” is very carefully associated to a descriptive piano figuration depicting the sound of the insect. This kind of care is evident throughout the lengthy setting, although in the absence of a printed score (the work remains unpublished) it is hard to determine whether this is the result of consideration by the composer or the performers.

And Bax’s response to the poem is sublime, a real masterpiece which does not begin to deserve its almost total neglect. I must admit to some doubt concerning whether Jeremy Huw Williams would be appropriate as a narrator of Dante Gabriel Rosetti’s verses; after all, the best-known setting of the poem by Debussy combines soprano and mezzo-soprano soloists for a French translation of the somewhat abridged narrative. But of course the greater part of the poem consists of a vision described by the bereaved male lover of the Damozel herself, and her own matching vision of his arrival by her side in Paradise only enters in the second half before the forlorn and half-depairing conclusion. Bax may not match the glorious melody which Debussy assigns to his soprano, but otherwise his delicate touch in the piano accompaniment (but so much more than a simple accompaniment!) time and again brings the meaning of the narrative to life. Lewis Foreman indicates in his note that Bax described the piano part as an “arrangement”, which might suggest that there was also an orchestral score which has been lost (or never written), and indeed one can imagine at several places the music to have been written with a rich orchestral tapestry of sound in the composer’s mind. The work itself, like Bax’s early symphony recently rediscovered and orchestrated by Martin Yates, really demands and deserves such a treatment if a suitably sympathetic editor could be found.

But here unfortunately comes the problem with this issue. In the past I have had cause for complaint about earlier recordings by this team, principally on account of the over-close microphone placement which has given the sound an undesirably unresonant and claustrophobic quality. Here the engineers (and Williams is credited as the recording producer) have gone to the other extreme, in a recorded perspective which places the piano at some distance in a highly reverberant acoustic which has the sort of echo associated with a swimming bath; and this is compounded by the fact that the voice is placed at a similar remove, sometimes indeed almost sounding as if from offstage, which means that the words are frequently occluded and sometimes nearly indecipherable. This is close to fatal in a form where the clarity of the words is so essential to the overall impression as in melodrama. It is ironic that reviews of the earlier disc of Bax songs from the same performers in the same venue, but recorded two years earlier, actually complain of a “close-miked recording” which is “recorded at an unusually high level” – which is clearly not the case here.

The short work (just over eight minutes) for cello and piano, with its song-like inflections, is similarly distanced in sound but the effect on the musical balance is much less serious here. On the other hand, in the songs the voice sometimes seems to be placed at an even further distance than in The blessed Damozel, and time and again the vocal melodies are obscured and smothered by the piano. This is a particularly serious problem in the case of the three songs where the words are not provided in the booklet since “it was not possible to obtain permission from the copyright holders” – indeed these are the only three poems still in copyright. One of these, the Rann of Wandering to words by Padraic Colum, is one of the most beautiful of the songs on this album with a melodic line that is heavily reminiscent of the Irish folksong She moved through the fair (to which Colum also is claimed to have supplied some lyrics). Nobody seems to have warned Lewis Foreman that the texts would not be provided for these songs, since he makes no attempts to describe their contents – which would have been helpful even if the acoustic had not rendered the vocal line so indistinguishable.

There are some other gems among these songs as well, and despite the reluctance of EM Records to claim them as “world premiere recordings” I cannot find details of any alternative performances of them – certainly not in the context of recitals of Bax songs which are in any event thin on the ground, as observed. The only real rival would appear to be that issued by Dutton in 2004 (and reviewed for this site by Em Marshall, the executive producer of this current disc); but this, like so many Dutton issues, appears to be dubiously available (it is not listed on Presto, and at the time of writing Amazon appear to only have a single second-hand copy).

To Eire is a glorious outpouring of fervour published in 1919 in the wake of the Easter Rising but actually composed nine years earlier; the words by J H Cousins (1873-1956) unfortunately are one of those examples omitted from the booklet; but, despite the apparent inability of the producers to supply these on copyright grounds, they are thankfully to be found on the Liedernet Archive (To Eire | To Thee, Beloved, of old there came | LiederNet); and the same site also furnishes the missing texts by Padraic Colum, although we are warned that their copyright status outside the USA and Canada is in doubt. The song was one of the items included in the earlier Dutton recital.

There are also some real curiosities here. We have three settings of Housman, two of them familiar poems drawn from A Shropshire Lad, which form a peculiar contrast to the more straightforward settings by others; Bax seems to have been particularly concerned to go through the surface bucolic cheerfulness to the melancholy undertow of the poetry, and When I was one-and-twenty makes a bizarre comparison with the more extrovert treatment of the verse in Butterworth’s cycle. The Chaucerian Roundel also has an almost Wagnerian overlay of passion which jars somewhat against the Middle English text. Jack and Jone, an arrangement of an ‘ayre’ by Thomas Campion, has some almost Britten-like incongruities. The two final songs, On the bridge (Thomas Hardy) and Watching the needleboats at San Sabba (James Joyce) find Bax in 1926 and 1931 reverting to his earlier simple style with charming effect; the first of these is also receiving its first recording. It is interesting to note how many of these songs were written for female voice (often given their first performances by one or another of Bax’s lengthy succession of ‘girlfriends’); but many of them nevertheless fit well with a male persona and rarely do the results sound unidiomatic here.

It seems strange, in view of the rarity of this repertoire and the sometimes superlative nature of Bax’s writing, that these recordings should have had to wait over three years before their release; or maybe some attempt was being made to revisit the recorded balance in the interests of greater clarity? In the end, the extreme desirability of The blessed Damozel itself makes this disc an essential acquisition for all Baxians despite its manifest drawbacks. It also stands as a memorial to Paula Fan who died in February 2023, less than a year after this recording was made; the biography included in the booklet makes no mention of this fact, although it does refer to her career in the past tense. Similarly the introductory booklet note is credited to Graham Parlett, who died in 2021; it may be that this is a reprint of his note from the earlier EM release of Bax songs recorded in 2020.

The current booklet and presentation are both excellent, however, together with some fascinating photographs including one of teenage Arnold Bax which makes quite a glamorous contrast to his later appearance. The songs are sensibly presented in the order of composition, which makes it possible to appreciate the manner in which Bax evolved his style over the years. And the duration of the disc, straining at the very limits of the technology, is sufficient to make one overlook the sometimes very brief breaks between individual tracks.

Paul Corfield Godfrey

Previous review: Nick Barnard (September 2025)

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Contents
The Blessed Damozel (1906)
A Milking Sian (1907)
The White Peace (1907)
Shieling Song (1908)
To Eire (1910)
Roundel (1914)
Parting (1916)
Far in a Western Brookland (1918)
Folk-Tale for Cello & Piano (1918)
Jack and Jone (1918)
When I was One-and-Twenty (1918)
The Market Girl (1922)
Rann of Exile (1922)
Rann of Wandering (1922)
I Heard a Soldier (1924)
In the Morning (1926)
On the Bridge (1926)
Watching the Needleboats at San Sabba (1931)