Here’s a rather belated (but still, of course, exceedingly welcome) addition to Eric Parkin’s three previous Bax anthologies for Chandos (12/87, 8/88 and 7/90 – all still available). In point of fact, the pretty, Mozartian pastiche of the Lento espressivo from the so-called Salzburg Sonata of 1937 (which features an idea used in the slow movement of Bax’s almost exactly contemporaneous Violin Concerto) was recorded by Parkin as long ago as June 1991; the remaining items date from August 1996.
The playful Whirligig (written in 1920 for the pianist and Bax’s fellow RAM student, Irene Scharrer) launches proceedings in delectable style. Published that same year (though probably conceived in 1913), the dashing Toccata bears an inscription to Hamilton Harty. Harriet Cohen (who described the Toccata as a “knockabout, virtuoso piece”) was the recipient of the 1915 ‘melody and variations’ entitled A mountain mood and the magnificent What the Minstrel told us. This haunting ballad was composed in 1919, the year of Bax’s first visit to his beloved Ireland since the 1916 Easter Rising (an event which shook the composer to his core), and the very essence of that island seems to course through its enchanted veins. A similar bardic sweep informs the wintry Legend from 1935 that Bax originally composed for the Australian pianist, John Simons (and which he eventually premiered 34 years later, Cohen having hung on to the manuscript until her death in 1967). No less entrancing is Dream in exile, written in 1916 and “affectionately dedicated to Tobias Matthay” (Bax’s piano teacher): not only can it boast a yearningly poignant secondary idea, the writing is exquisite in its pellucid assurance.
Elsewhere, that winsome picture-postcard, Mediterranean, and the confidently striding Paean will already be familiar from their subsequent orchestral versions (Bryden Thomson’s LPO account of the latter piece shares a CD with the Third Symphony and Dance of Wild Irravel; Chandos, 12/86), while both the Serpent Dance and Ceremonial Dance derive from Bax’s incidental music to The Truth about the Russian Dancers, which featured the legendary Ballets Russes ballerina, Tamara Karsavina, and dates from 1920. That same year, Karsavina was also the dedicatee of The slave girl, an exotic and sinuous confection for which, as Cohen noted at the time, Karsavina “created a fierce and strange dance mime”. That just leaves the brooding 1914 passacaglia In the Night, which had to wait until 1986 for its first professional airing (in a BBC broadcast given by Martin Roscoe).
As before, Parkin is an unfailingly perceptive exponent of this ravishing repertoire (though a rival performance of the Legend from John McCabe conveys perhaps even more of its slumbering, runic power) and he has been well served by the Chandos technicians. A self-recommending issue for all Baxians.'