Arnold Bax’s earliest tone-poem, Cathaleen-ni-Hoolihan began life in 1903 as the slow movement of a String Quartet in E (the second of two quartets he completed as a student at the Royal Academy of Music). Two years later, Bax made an arrangement for small orchestra, but it was never performed in his lifetime. It’s a touchingly sincere and often astonishingly prescient essay, from which Bax profitably quarried material for his 1908 tone-poem Into the Twilight (try from 4'46).
In the summer of 1911 he fell under the spell of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes and their prima ballerina, Karsavina, and quickly completed the piano score of a full-length ballet entitled Tamara. The following year, however, Diaghilev’s troupe returned to London with Balakirev’s eponymous tone-poem, and though Bax changed the name of his ballet to King Kojata, he never embarked on the orchestration. The present 23-minute suite was compiled by Graham Parlett (whose exemplary Catalogue of the Works of Sir Arnold Bax was published by OUP: 1999), and his idiomatic scoring brings out the unashamedly Russian tang of Bax’s gorgeously tuneful inspiration. Towards the end, listen for that heaven-sent melody that Bax later reworked as the ‘Dance of Motherhood’ in his incidental music from 1920 for JM Barrie’s The Truth about the Russian Dancers (Chandos, 10/90).
I’d always thought of London Pageant (1937) as being little more than pastiche, a Coronation pot-boiler comprehensively outflanked by Walton’s Crown Imperial. Here, however, it emerges as a swaggering processional of no mean substance.
That leaves the engagingly relaxed Concertante for three wind instruments and orchestra, written for the March 1949 Sir Henry Wood Memorial Concert. True, the finale serves up a pretty thin brew, but the third movement (‘Pastoral’) contains some ravishing writing for the solo horn, while the final flowering of the cor anglais’ wistful song in the opening ‘Elegy’ reveals a touching kinship with the ornate central melody of In the Faery Hills (1909).
Martyn Brabbins directs a set of performances as crisply polished as they are infectious, and Chandos’s sound is characteristically sumptuous to match