This is one of the most valuable Compact Disc releases so far. Bax's more opulent orchestral music poses difficult problmes of balance and of structural clarification for players and conductor, but their work is in vain if the recording is at all congested or unfocused. It may even be that the vicious circle of neglect into which his music has fallen over the last 30 years has been intesified by the fact that the present generation has encountered him, if at all, only in recordings which tend to confirm his reputation as a boneless rhapsodist, a garrulous and undisciplined purveyor of gorgeous orchestral colour.
The digital LP version of this fine collection is very good indeed, but the CD equivalent has an even wider dynamic range, an important degree or two more of impact and clarity and a still greater sense of space. The finely calculated and highly individual character of Bax's orchestration is more evident than I have ever heard it outside the concert hall; without the recording ever becoming clinical, the sinew of the music is never obscured by the often ornately sumptuous surface. At the climax of The Garden of Fand, for example, the almost visual sense of a huge wave towering before it breaks is quite startling, and the dark passions beneath the surface of November Woods are all the more apparent for the clear and natural perspective that the recording provides. The two 'lesser' works, even, reveal layers that one might not have suspected were there: a quite sharp wit in The Happy Forest and a sense of slumbering power in Summer Music. Like MH when the compilation first appeared on LP, I do hope that the success of his first collection will prompt Bryden Thomson and Chandos to explore Bax's other tone poems: CD is the ideal medium for them.'