Chandos's valiant service to the cause of Arnold Bax continues with this third volume of music for the piano performed by Eric Parkin, whose championship of the composer is equally praiseworthy. I continue to believe that he has an easier and ultimately more rewarding brief than the conductors of the symphonies and tone-poems. Bax's orchestral music is notable above all for its colour and harmonic splendour, rather less for its structure. In the chamber music, and even more markedly in the works for piano, he works in smaller forms and in consequence he disciplines his imagination. He was never short of good melodic ideas. In the music for piano, these ideas were kept strictly within bounds—nothing on this disc lasts longer than eight and a third minutes—and he writes so marvellously for the keyboard that he manages to suggest a range of tone-colour no less striking than when he is writing for a large orchestra.
Most of the pieces Parkin has recorded here were composed between 1912 and 1916, a critical period in Bax's life, for it covered the aftermath of his visit to Russia at the height of a love affair, the start of his long affair with the pianist Harriet Cohen (dedicatee of four of the pieces) and the Easter Rising in Dublin, with which Bax was emotionally involved.
Of the two Russian tone-poems, the nocturne May Night in the Ukraine is perhaps the finest piece of music on the disc, a reminder that the climate in Russia can be very hot. The languorous, shifting harmonies, reminiscent at first of Chopin, later of Debussy, conjure up the drowsy atmosphere of what Bax so eloquently described as the ''fair and smiling'' land of the Ukraine.
Several of the other pieces are in a similar mood; the essence of Bax the Romantic. The Maiden with the Daffodil, his memory of his first meeting with 18-year-old Harriet, is a touching, star-struck idyll, worth the attention of any recitalist. I was also moved by the deceptively titled On a May Evening, in which the rhythms of an Irish jig are used as a ghostly kind of counterpoint, filled with grief, to the more conventional tone-painting of the Irish landscape.
Eric Parkin's performances are ideal, with just the right amount of understatement so that the prevailing mood of rather wan despair never becomes cloying. Technically they are impeccable. The recording, made in The Maltings, Snape, shows that it really is possible to capture faithfully the tonal subtleties of fine piano-playing. It was produced by Christopher Palmer, who contributes the valuable notes.'