Information
Composer: Arnold Bax; Stanley Bate
- Bax - Cello Concerto
- Bate - Cello Concerto
Lionel Handy, cello
Royal Scottish National Orchestra
Martin Yates, conductor
Date: 2016
Label: Lyrita
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‘Have you considered the horror of trying to write a cello concerto? That is my hideous fate.’ Ever the self-dramatist, Arnold Bax came up with this not very encouraging statement in a letter to a friend in 1932. Premiered two years later by Italian cellist Gaspar Cassadò, Bax’s Concerto has pretty much languished ever since – a situation not helped by the solo part’s seemingly wilful degree of difficulty, which perhaps on some level reflects Bax’s complicated attitude to the project. For all that, the work itself is a substantial and impressive statement – written in the searching, wiry idiom of Bax the mature symphonist, when his music had developed far beyond the self-styled ‘brazen Romanticism’ of his earlier manner, while still retaining its vivid mastery of orchestral atmospherics. These are excellently delivered by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra under Martin Yates; and if the solo part’s technical demands in the very opening stages hint at stretching even Lionel Handy’s huge expertise, his delivery of the rest of the work is state-of-the-art.
Stanley Bate (1911-59), a still under-rated composer, completed his Cello Concerto in 1953; this excellently performed first recording reveals a work which, while lacking (for instance) Bax’s strong individuality, nonetheless has much to say, particularly in its beautifully sustained central Andante movement.
-- Malcolm Hayes, BBC Music Magazine
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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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Stanley Bate (12 December 1911 – 19 October 1959) was an English composer and pianist. He studied under Ralph Vaughan Williams, R.O. Morris, Gordon Jacob, and Arthur Benjamin at the Royal College of Music. He also studied in Paris with Nadia Boulanger and then in Berlin with Paul Hindemith. Bate moved to America in 1941 and saw great successes there, although he found it hard to replicate his international successes at home. Short of money and depressed by his lack of recognition, Bate died in 1959 aged 47, having suffered a breakdown a few months before. His music quickly fell into obscurity following his death.
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Lionel Handy studied at the Royal Academy of Music, then with Janos Starker in Banff and Pierre Fournier in Geneva. He was principal cellist of the Academy of St Martin in the Fields for ten years with whom he recorded and toured extensively throughout USA and Europe. Later, as solo cellist with the Bournemouth Sinfonietta, he performed an eclectic range of concertos ranging from CPE Bach and Haydn to Taverner and Roxburgh. Handy has been a professor at the Royal Academy of Music since 1982, in addition to teaching at summer schools and masterclasses throughout Europe. He plays on a cello by Fendt (circa 1820).
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