What if the self-styled decadent aesthetic of Tsarist Russia had the Revolution not been dynamited in its homeland, and had Parisian fashions not seduced it in its exile? What if the late-romantic notion of musical composition as a narrative of soul-states had not fallen into such disrepute after the Great War? Bax, the ''brazen romantic'', who knew his Balakirev, Glazunov, Scriabin and Stravinsky as well as anyone, provides intriguingly angled answers.
For some the chromatic hypertrophy of his harmony is an insuperable obstacle—oh for a good healthy storm to clear the air. For others, and I include myself, the unique Baxian poetic sensibility is impossible to detach from that same oppressiveness, and it has as much to do with resistance and protest as with self-indulgence. The defiant opening of the First Symphony already makes that plain. This would have been his third Piano Sonata had Arthur Alexander and Harriet Cohen not sensed a symphony struggling to get out. Bax then felt compelled to re-compose the slow movement; but the original proves to be a highly evocative piece, with its impressionistic festoons of decoration and characteristically over-fertile invention. Given what Ravel managed to do with his ''Une barque sur l'ocean'', I cannot believe that it was the piano idiom that stood in the way of an orchestration; more likely Bax was seeking a darker emotional tenor.
As ever, the piano tends to lay bare harmonic structures and puts its own slant on the style. The first movement, so suggestive of Holst in the orchestral version, here sounds far more Scriabinesque, while the curious half-hearted revelries of the finale (not my favourite Bax movement, I confess) acquire more than a whiff of Percy Grainger. The Second Sonata starts in candid emulation of Scriabin's Seventh, and though it lacks the focused intensity of that work it compensates by its own idiomatic harmonic flavour. In the Legend, too, Bax is always looking deeper than the obviously gratifying gesture.
John McCabe is a fluent, intelligent and self-effacing player, more interested in subtleties of atmosphere and pacing than invitations to rhetoric. His Fazioli instrument has a beautiful basic tone but also a tendency to woofiness in the mid-to-low register of which Bax is so fond. Otherwise the recorded sound is fully worthy of this more than praiseworthy project.'