Bax's Violin Concerto has a curious history. It was written in 1937–8 for Heifetz, who didn't want it—not surprisingly, for it doesn't sound like a Heifetz work. So Bax put it away for five years while Walton's and Britten's concertos appeared and were successful and then sent it to Eda Kersey, who gave the first performance with Sir Henry Wood. I heard it and can still recall the superb playing of the soloist, who died aged 40 the following year. Does anyone remember her?
There is poignancy about this recording, for it marks the end of the late Bryden Thomson's valiant championship of Bax's orchestral music for Chandos. He conducts a mellow, affectionate performance of the Concerto, an attractive work, more lightly scored than much of Bax and with an unusually shaped first movement entitled ''Overture, Ballad and Scherzo'' which is almost a miniature concerto in itself. The adagio which follows combines Elgarian wistfulness with Baxian lushness and the finale contrasts a jolly rondo section with a seductive waltz. Lydia Mordkovitch plays the solo part with real flair and richness of tone and seems to me to bring poetic and romantic feelings to the work similar to those of its first interpreter.
A Legend is the last of Bax's 22 symphonic-poems, a last and I fear vain attempt to recapture the power and beauty of his Tintagel. All the familiar Bax fingerprints are there—colourful scoring, evocation of wind and waves and 'battles long ago'—but in spite of the stirring advocacy of Thomson and the LPO, it sounds rather like a last fling and deteriorates into an empty march-like finale. The disc is completed by six items of incidental music Bax wrote in 1945 for his brother Clifford's play Golden Eagle, about Mary, Queen of Scots. As always in the Chandos Bax series, the recording is exemplary.'