Bax wrote his Symphonic Variations during the 1914–18 war for Harriet Cohen (with whom he was by then living, having left his wife for her) and gave her the exclusive right to perform the work for this reason, perhaps, it was never published. She played it quite frequently in the 1920s and 1930s, but in 1948 an accident robbed her of the use of her right hand. Reluctance among other pianists to play 'her' Variations would have been natural, the more so since any such performance would have revealed that she had always omitted a substantial and formally important section of the piece because it taxed her technique beyond its limits. In consequence one of Bax's most eloquent works was not heard again during his lifetime and has been played only a couple of times since his death 30 years ago—and not at all since the current revival of interest in his music.
The piece has a curious structure. Although it plays for very nearly 50 minutes it consists, apart from an intermezzo, of only six 'variations' (extended rhapsodic mood pieces, rather), ranging from four to 11 minutes in length. Each section has a title, but almost all of them are baffling. The first, called ''Youth'' (this is the passage that Cohen omitted) is certainly bold, floridly gestural and passionate, and the third (''Strife'') is appropriately aggressive and brittle (though there is delicacy as well in some of its more dance-like pages). But there is nothing especially crepuscular about the beautifully rhapsodic and very Rachmaninov-like second section (''Nocturne''), and I cannot imagine what Bax was thinking of when he called the long, nobly impassioned central slow movement ''The Temple''. Nor is there anything really playful about the fifth variation, ''Play'' (an energetic and forceful but certainly not lighthearted scherzo), while the final section can only have been called ''Triumph'' ironically: it attempts nobility but is overcome by shadow and ends bitterly. Even the intermezzo (sub-titled ''Enchantment'') is haunted by an insistent drum rhythm and only achieves real enchantment (a passage of characteristically Baxian filigree) after a climax of protesting vehemence. It is an uncomfortable and ungainly piece, but one can readily see why it was once one of Bax's most popular: its expression is for him uncommonly direct and unambiguous, and the solo part is excitingly spectacular. Indeed, although the powerful emotions the piece expresses are no doubt rooted in Bax's feelings about the war about the Easter uprising in Ireland and about Harriet Cohen herself, it is surely no less important that he was writing for the keyboard again. Although he never played in public, Bax was by all accounts a formidable pianist, and the solo writing here is flamboyantly virtuoso. One can say no better of Margaret Fingerhut's playing than the piece has been waiting nearly 60 years for the sort of full-blooded performance that she gives it, and she is admirably seconded by orchestral playing of character and finesse and by a spacious recording.
Morning Song has moments of touchingly simple lyricism, but others of aimlessness and clod-hopping as well; it is minor stuff, but the Variations are major Bax: flawed and unequal, no doubt, but containing some of his most vehement and most personal music.MEO