Sir Arnold Bax - Symphony No. 3 (1929)

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• published: 09 Feb 2014
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I. Lento Moderato - 00:00 II. Lento - 20:48 III. Moderato - Epilogue - Poco Lento - 33:54 In many ways it must seem that the 1920s brought Bax his period of greatest success. He was prolific in his creativity and his works were widely performed. With the end of his marriage he was able to continue his close association with the pianist Harriet Cohen, although this did not preclude other relationships. He wrote a quantity of piano music for Harriet Cohen, including a piano concerto for the left hand after the injury in 1948 that made use of her right hand for a time impossible. The 1930s brought public honours and at the end of the decade appointment as Master of the King's Musick, although his gifts did not lend themselves easily to the composition of occasional celebratory works. as the position seemed to demand. The changes in musical style and taste left Bax to some extent alienated from the world in which he found himself. Composition continued. however. including a Coronation March in 1952 for the accession of the new monarch. He died, as he might have wished, in Ireland, while staying with his friend, the German-born Irish composer Aloys Fleischman in Cork, the place he loved best. Bax started work in earnest on his Symphony No.3 during the winter of 1928-29. In a cold room at the Station Hotel in Morar, on the west coast of Scotland, he developed the sketches he had made at home in London into what was to prove at one time the most popular of his symphonies. He dedicated the work, described by the viola-player Bernard Shore as 'as thrilling to playas to listen to,' to Sir Henry Wood, a champion of his music, who conducted the first performance of the symphony in March 1930. The work is scored for a large orchestra and includes in its percussion section side drum, bass drum and tenor drum, cymbals, tambourine, glockenspiel, xylophone, celesta, gong and anvil. The first of the three movements, scored initially for wind instruments, offers a mysterious opening bassoon melody that slowly unwinds, its first three notes later to assume unifying importance. The lower strings introduce a new element, an accompaniment to solemn open chords from the brass, before the music grows faster and more urgent in tone, with the emergence of a new and insistent rhythmic theme, leading to a dynamic climax. The music subsides into a gentler mood, led by five solo violins into a second section of greater serenity, slowly developed before the interruption of the figure with which the movement had opened, emphatically stated, and now taking on a continuing role. The winding theme of the introduction is entrusted at first to muted violas, leading to the return of thematic and motivic elements of the earlier part of the movement, in their starkness or meditative tenderness, before a fierce conclusion. A horn solo starts the second movement, followed by the shimmering of the lower strings and the entry of a solo trumpet with an evocative melody in music of some poignancy. This reflects a less menacing landscape of greater pastoral tranquillity but has a growing feeling of nostalgia about it. The mood is shattered by the opening of the third movement, which soon leads to a vigorously rhythmic theme, the suggestion of an energetic scherzo, which proceeds to further thematic material before the return of the serene second subject of the first movement. This leads to the Epilogue, starting with an oboe and clarinet theme over the steady tread of a string and harp accompaniment. Here What has passed is recalled in tranquillity.