Bax symphony no 3

 Day 85

Bax Symphony no 3

BBC Philharmonic

Vernon Handley

After a period of concentration on Russian and French Opera I thought that I would change direction and spend a bit of time on 20th century British symphonies. Once you get past the obvious names of Elgar, Vaughan Williams and Walton my knowledge of this repertoire is very thin so this project is an obvious way to catch up with an area of music I ought to know better than I do.

My experience of Bax is limited to a few piano piece and Tintagel, which I have played a couple of times. I've said before in this project that the opening of that piece is wonderful but I don't think that the composer sustains that level of invention through the score.

I have to say that I didn't get much pleasure from this symphony. I couldn't really see what Bax was tying to achieve. The structure was quite odd - a long first movement which had a slow section in the middle, followed by a slow movement. Then a jaunty finale which ended with an epilogue which seemed to me (I didn't time it) almost as long as the rest of the movement.  Also I didn't get any sense of stylistic consistency. Quite different styles were interlinked without, to me at any rate, any overall sense of unity. And to have a single anvil stroke at the climax of the first movement just seemed bizarre.

There were some beautiful passages in the slow movement and epilogue, which did remind you that this was the composer of Tintagel, but to me there were not enough of them to justify the symphony as a whole. So a disappointment, and I won't be returning to Bax for a while, though no doubt there are treasures to be found elsewhere in the symphonies - he has a high reputation among at least some commentators