The piano is still one of the most difficult instruments to record really well. All too often the sound emerges as metallic, if not downright tinny, or it is clear in the treble and mushy in the bass. In this selection of Bax's piano music, Chandos seem to have solved the problem as well as I have yet encountered. The works are played on a Bosendorfer with unerring skill and unfailing insight and sympathy by Eric Parkin, that friend and champion of the English romantics. The tone is pleasing and natural almost throughout—just a hint of plumminess at the climax of the Second Sonata—with a virtually silent LP surface.
Bax was himself an exceptional pianist and his piano works are among his most satisfying. As Christopher Palmer says in amost informative and reasoned essay on the sleeve, there is always an impression of orchestral timbres. Palmer also stresses the powerful influence of Russian music and of a visit to Russia itself on the Bax of the 1910-20 period from which these works date. The influence of Scriabin is perhaps deepest, or so it sounds to me, in the exotic harmonies of the First Sonata, music much tauter than Bax often achieved and all the better for it.
The Second Sonata, also in one movement, is a bleak, tragic and consistently gripping work, most eloquently performed here by Parkin, its mainly pessimistic mood prophesied in the passacaglia, Winter Waters of 1915. To most listeners these works will be hitherto unexplored territory (the Lullaby is a delightful miniature), and they add considerably to our knowledge and understanding of a composer whose unfathomable nature makes him one of the most tantalizing figures in British music of this century. Devout Baxians ought by now to have 'Chandos' engraved on their hearts.'