Information
Composer: Arnold Bax
- Lullaby (Berceuse)
- Country-Tune
- Sonata No. 1
- Winter Waters
- Sonata No. 2 in F sharp minor
Eric Parkin, piano
Date: 1987
Label: Chandos
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The piano is still one of the most difficult instruments to record really well. All too often the sound emerges as metallic, if not downright tinny, or it is clear in the treble and mushy in the bass. In this selection of Bax's piano music, Chandos seem to have solved the problem as well as I have yet encountered. The works are played on a Bosendorfer with unerring skill and unfailing insight and sympathy by Eric Parkin, that friend and champion of the English romantics. The tone is pleasing and natural almost throughout—just a hint of plumminess at the climax of the Second Sonata—with a virtually silent LP surface.
Bax was himself an exceptional pianist and his piano works are among his most satisfying. As Christopher Palmer says in amost informative and reasoned essay on the sleeve, there is always an impression of orchestral timbres. Palmer also stresses the powerful influence of Russian music and of a visit to Russia itself on the Bax of the 1910-20 period from which these works date. The influence of Scriabin is perhaps deepest, or so it sounds to me, in the exotic harmonies of the First Sonata, music much tauter than Bax often achieved and all the better for it.
The Second Sonata, also in one movement, is a bleak, tragic and consistently gripping work, most eloquently performed here by Parkin, its mainly pessimistic mood prophesied in the passacaglia, Winter Waters of 1915. To most listeners these works will be hitherto unexplored territory (the Lullaby is a delightful miniature), and they add considerably to our knowledge and understanding of a composer whose unfathomable nature makes him one of the most tantalizing figures in British music of this century. Devout Baxians ought by now to have 'Chandos' engraved on their hearts.
-- Gramophone
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Arnold Bax (8 November 1883 – 3 October 1953) was an English composer, poet, and author. His prolific output includes songs, choral music, chamber pieces, and solo piano works, but he is best known for his orchestral music. In addition to a series of symphonic poems, he wrote seven symphonies and was for a time widely regarded as the leading British symphonist. In his last years he found his music regarded as old-fashioned, and after his death it was generally neglected. From the 1960s onwards his music was gradually rediscovered, although little of it is regularly heard in the concert hall.
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Eric Parkin (24 March 1924 – 3 February 2020) was an English pianist. He studied at Trinity College of Music, making his classical debut at the Wigmore Hall in 1948 and his Proms debut, playing John Ireland's Piano Concerto, in 1953. Although his musical interests spanned the Classical and Romantic periods, he became best known for his recorded performances and recitals of 20th-century British music. Later in life he increasingly recorded French and American repertoire. Parkin recorded more than 80 albums over his career from the early 1950s onwards, for Argo, Lyrita, Chandos, Priory and Unicorn.
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