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• • • BAX DYSON VEALE BLISS VIOLIN CONCERTOS Lydia Mordkovitch violin London Philharmonic Orchestra • City of London Sinfonia BBC Symphony Orchestra • BBC National Orchestra of Wales Richard Hickox • Bryden Thomson Nick Johnston Nick Lydia Mordkovitch (1944 – 2014) British Violin Concertos COMPACT DISC ONE Sir Arnold Bax (1883 – 1953) Concerto for Violin and Orchestra* 35:15 1 I Overture, Ballade and Scherzo. Allegro risoluto – Allegro moderato – Poco largamente 14:47 2 II Adagio 11:41 3 III Allegro – Slow valse tempo – Andante con moto 8:45 Sir George Dyson (1883 – 1964) Violin Concerto† 43:14 4 I Molto moderato 20:14 5 II Vivace 5:08 6 III Poco andante 10:39 7 IV Allegro ma non troppo 7:06 TT 78:39 3 COMPACT DISC TWO Sir Arthur Bliss (1891 – 1975) Concerto for Violin and Orchestra‡ 41:48 To Alfredo Campoli 1 I Allegro ma non troppo – Più animato – L’istesso tempo – Più agitato – Tempo I – Tranquillo – Più animato – Tempo I – Più animato – Molto tranquillo – Moderato – Tempo I – Più mosso – Animato 15:43 2 II Vivo – Tranquillo – Vivo – Meno mosso – Animando – Vivo 8:49 3 III Introduzione. Andante sostenuto – Allegro deciso in modo zingaro – Più mosso (scherzando) – Subito largamente – Cadenza – Andante molto tranquillo – Animato – Ancora più vivo 17:10 4 John Veale (1922 – 2006) Violin Concerto§ 35:38 4 I Moderato – Allegro – Tempo I – Allegro 15:55 5 II Lament. Largo 11:47 6 III Vivace – Andantino – Tempo I – Andantino – Tempo I – Andantino – Tempo I 7:53 TT 77:36 Lydia Mordkovitch violin London Philharmonic Orchestra* City of London Sinfonia† BBC National Orchestra of Wales‡ Lesley Hatfield leader BBC Symphony Orchestra§ Stephen Bryant leader Bryden Thomson* Richard Hickox†‡§ 5 British Violin Concertos Bax: Concerto for Violin and Orchestra on the manuscript testifies) but according Sir Arnold Bax’s (1883 – 1953) career as an to William Walton, Heifetz found the music orchestral composer started in 1905 with disappointing. Presumably it was not the symphonic poem Cathaleen ni Hoolihan, sufficiently virtuosic. Bax did not even but he did not write .in the long-established acknowledge its existence until, during the large-scale forms of concerto and symphony war, he received a commission for a new for many years. His first concerto came work for St. Cecilia’s Day, 1943 and produced in 1920 when he wrote his Phantasy for the concerto for the violinist Eda Kersey Viola and Orchestra (at first actually called to play, with the BBC Symphony Orchestra ‘Concerto’) and followed it in 1932 with his conducted by Sir Henry Wood. It was the Cello Concerto. Bax also wrote several works last time Sir Henry championed a new work for piano and orchestra but none was a by Bax, a composer whom he had first concerto in the proper sense of the word. conducted at the 1910 season of London’s His cycle of seven symphonies also started Promenade Concerts. The concerto was early in the 1920s, and between 1921 and a considerable success though its early 1938 they dominated his output and were promotion was interrupted by the tragic death the foundation of his reputation up to the of the violinist in the summer of 1944, soon Second World War. after her fortieth birthday. All this activity was behind him when he Certainly the work marks a new approach came to write his Violin Concerto in 1937, for Bax: comparatively lightly scored, it is completing it in March 1938. That was charming and romantic in contrast to the immediately before he started work on the Sturm und Drang of the symphonies. When Seventh Symphony, though it was one of asked to describe it, he remarked ‘Well his last extended scores to appear before I suppose it’s rather like Raff’, possibly the public when it was first performed over referring to the Raff of the Cavatina rather five years later. Bax wrote this concerto than the symphonies. Perhaps the world of for Heifetz (as the dedication ‘For Firenze’ the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto is a better 6 parallel. In his first movement Bax develops waltz. A fast section follows and again in this the concept of a three-movements-in-one movement we have reinstated (at ten bars form that had been first used in the last after S) a wonderful passage of gossamer movement of the Sixth Symphony in 1934, running semiquavers reminiscent of the fairy referring to the opening music as an Overture, dancing in his tone poem In the Faery Hills, and following this with a Ballad and Scherzo. before another passage in waltz time leads to The opening idea of the slow movement a trumpet solo and the return of the opening alludes to the Elgar Violin Concerto, though idea presaging the rush to the close. the shape of the music might also be © Lewis Foreman construed as a reference to his friend Benjamin Dale’s Piano Sonata of 1905. Later in the movement appears a passage which Dyson: Violin Concerto is in fact orchestrated from a curious piano In a generation when many of the leading sonata that Bax wrote the same year: among composers came from well-off backgrounds, Bax’s papers there survives a manuscript and not a few had private incomes, it is in his own hand of a four movement Sonata good to remember that Sir George Dyson in B flat which he called Salzburg, noting (1883 – 1964), doyen of public school music on the score ‘Paris (conjectured) circa and the first director of the Royal College of 1788’ and ‘author unknown’. However it Music to have been a student there, in fact is clear the music is by Bax and the Lento came from a humble northern working-class espressivo second movement yields the background and was entirely a self-made decorated ‘Mozartian’ second subject idea man. heard in the slow movement of the Violin It has still not been explained why Concerto that might be compared to ideas Sir Charles Villiers Stanford, during his in the post-Second World War concertos of long tenure as professor of composition Richard Strauss. For those with the violin and at the Royal College of Music, should have piano score, note at letter Q the addition of a produced so many composers of stature, all forty-second cadenza- like passage in double with highly personal and individual styles, stopping that Bax deleted before publication. when his method appears to have been In the final rondo the vigorous opening one that should have produced clones of idea is contrasted with a delicious slow his own approach. Perhaps he exacerbated 7 the students’ natural rebelliousness! Dyson Parry recommended him to be music master is no exception to this generation and at the Royal Naval College at Osborne, and his personality is evident in a forthright from there it was but a step to Marlborough tunefulness, in certain characteristic twists College, and after three years to Rugby. of harmony and orchestration, and an Finding himself in the infantry at the eschewing of the more advanced tendencies outbreak of war, he wrote a ‘Manual of of his day. Grenade Fighting’ later widely circulated In his autobiography Dyson remembered as ‘Grenade Warfare’. Shell-shocked in 1916 playing the organ for church services at he convalesced for some time. Eventually the age of thirteen and was a Fellow of the he found himself working in the Air Ministry Royal College of Organists at just sixteen. where he helped establish RAF bands, and Thus he became an open scholar at the RCM, he also partly composed the RAF March Past coming to London in 1900. He studied there that Sir Walford Davies had sketched in short for four years and then won the Mendelssohn score. In 1920 Dyson’s Three Rhapsodies scholarship which allowed him to travel for string quartet, composed soon after on the continent. On Stanford’s advice his return from the continent before the he chose Italy where he encountered the war were chosen for publication under the leading Italian orchestral composers of their Carnegie Publication scheme. To crown his day: Buonamici, Sgambati and Martucci. achievement and the return to normality, he He also spent some time in Vienna, Berlin was appointed to Wellington College, and also and Dresden. He thus met many of the became a professor at the Royal College of leading musicians of the day – including Music. It was at this time that he wrote his Richard Strauss, and Joachim, and later, in celebrated book The New Music published London, Nikisch played his early Straussian in 1924, and widely admired in its day for its symphonic poem which he called Siena. learning and apparently common-sense view. He returned to London in 1907. Thus this (In a footnote he says: ‘my difficulty is that I working class boy from industrial Halifax cannot find a logical definition of atonality’.) had, by the age of twenty-four, acquired an The most productive part of Dyson’s life enviable musical technique, and a patina as a composer came while he was director of of the genteel man-about-Europe. But he music at Winchester College, an appointment needed to earn his living, and Sir Hubert he held from 1924 to 1937, only leaving to 8 become Director of the Royal College of Dyson’s Violin Concerto dates from the Music. Here not only was he organist, but he Second World War and was completed in had a choir and orchestra for concerts as well 1941. Albert Sammons championed the new as an adult choral society. If one said that he work and recommended it to Sir Adrian Boult composed as a hobby, one would give quite in September 1941.

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