Arnold Bax - Tone Poems Vol. 1 (Vernon Handley)

Information

Composer: Arnold Bax

• In the Faery Hills
• November Woods
• The Garden of Fand
• Sinfonietta "Symphonic Fantasy"

BBC Philharmonic Orchestra

Vernon Handley, conductor

Date: 2006

Label: Chandos

https://www.chandos.net/products/catalogue/CHAN%2010362

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Review

In the Faery Hills and The Garden of Fand are among Bax’s loveliest and most loveable creations, and though the windswept November Woods is far less tuneful, its emotional undercurrents run unfathomably deep. Bryden Thomson’s shimmering, sensuous interpretations of these scores, recorded for Chandos some 20 years ago (1/84R, 9/85R), laid bare the music’s Impressionist roots; Vernon Handley (in an encore to his Gramophone Award-winning set of Bax’s symphonies, 12/03) takes a tougher, more vigorous view. The only place he’s notably slower than Thomson is in November Woods, yet how much darker and more ominous are the leaden skies that Handley paints. Indeed, even in such sensitive hands as Boult’s, some of the stormier passages sound rather like film music, while Handley’s deliberate focus on motivic clarity brings out a Wagnerian grandeur and gravity that strengthen the work’s narrative backbone.

In The Garden of Fand and In the Faery Hills Handley adopts brisk tempi, occasionally pushing the music into a kind of giddy ecstasy that makes Thomson’s fragrant, graceful readings sound downright languorous. If only the BBC Philharmonic were as flatteringly recorded as Thomson’s Ulster Orchestra or, for that matter, the RSNO in David Lloyd-Jones’s superb cycle (Naxos, 4/98, 6/99). Lloyd-Jones’s dynamic direction is similar in spirit to Handley’s, in fact, and almost as arrestingly characterised – but not quite. Certainly Handley’s performance of the 1932 Sinfonietta eclipses Barry Wordsworth’s listless account (Naxos, 7/88R). This restless, syncopated score may not be top-drawer Bax but the Manchester musicians play it with the fervour of true believers.

-- Andrew Farach-Colton, Gramophone

More reviews:
ClassicsToday  ARTISTIC QUALITY: 9 / SOUND QUALITY: 10

https://musicwebinternational.com/2024/05/bax-tone-poems-chandos/

https://www.classicalsource.com/cd/arnold-bax-tone-poems-vernon-handley/

https://www.amazon.com/Bax-Poems-Faery-Hills-November/dp/B000EFTEAS

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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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_Bax

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Vernon Handley (11 November 1930 – 10 September 2008) was a British conductor. He studied at the Guildhall School of Music and was a pupil of Adrian Boult. Handley was Principal Conductor of the Ulster Orchestra from 1985 to 1989, and Conductor Laureate from 2003. From 1986 to 1988, he was chief conductor of the Malmö Symphony Orchestra. He was appointed Principal Conductor of the English Symphony Orchestra in January 2007. Handley is much revered for his enthusiastic and untiring championship of British music. The majority of his recordings were of British music, including as many as a hundred premières.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernon_Handley

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