Almost any 90-second fragment of Bax's Winter Legends, heard at random, will persuade you that it must be one of his most striking and effective works. The assault of drums and the driving Prokofievian piano toccata at the outset, the rather bardic declamatory piano solo that occurs a few minutes later, the curiously Petrushka-like dance that heralds the triumphant conclusion, the imaginative alternation at the beginning of the next movement of a beautiful but shadowed idea for the bassoon and delicately clashing figures for the soloist, the lovely horn solo that begins this movement's dreaming central section, the mysterious tuba melody (accompanied, octaves above, by piano filigree) that introduces the finale—all these are strong and potentially fruitful ideas, and there are many more of them in this 45 - minute, three-movement quasi-concerto. But does Bax do anything more with them than lay them end to end, abandoning each and moving on to another as the fancy takes him?
After two or three hearings a few unifying ideas do reveal themselves: a recurring rhythmic figure in the opening movement, an occasional cross-reference from one part of the work to another. But Bax's description of the first movement (''the form is free''—the reason he gave for not calling the piece a symphony) still seems something of an understatement for the work as a whole: why does the first movement end triumphantly? Precious little thematic or tonal conflict has been established—let alone resolved—to justify it (contrast, yes, in abundance, but that is not quite the same thing). Why does the predominantly unquiet, often turbulent central Lento end with a progression from darkness to light? Bax hinted at a programme for the work but did not reveal it, so the listener must do his best to provide one, as a reason for the movements (or even their various constituent parts) being played in this order rather than some other. The parts are splendid, however, representing most of Bax's moods from the barbaric to the melting, from sumptuous saturated colour to the craggiest of brutal rhythms, and in a performance as assured as this (Margaret Fingerhut copes admirably with Bax's demands for a languishing Rachmaninovian manner at one moment, a pounding Bartokian percussiveness the next) there are plenty of inducements to continue attempting to solve the enigma.
And perhaps the Saga Fragment (Bax's own arrangement, for piano and chamber orchestra, of a one-movement piano quartet) is a clue. It is as schizoid in its contrasts of mood as Winter Legends, but because it is shorter (about 11 minutes) and there are fewer ideas to cope with, its 'plot' is more easily perceived: the archetypally Baxian lyricism of its second paragraph does not so much vanquish the spiky forcefulness of the opening matter as channel it, first into Sibelian gravity (oh, yes: there are distinct overtones of Sibelius's similarly unspecified En saga), then into optimism. It, too, is finely played, and in both works Bryden Thomson deploys Bax's juxtapositions of violent and shaded colour with great precision. Excellent orchestral playing and a first-rate recording, the pianist in a much more natural perspective than is customary these days.'