Orchestral Works

CHAN 10366 Cover.qxd 11/9/06 11:58 am Page 1 CHANDOS CLASSICS ORCHESTRAL WORKS Enchanted Summer • Walsinghame • Fatherland VERNON HANDLEY Brighton Festival Chorus Royal Philharmonic Orchestra • Vernon Handley CHAN 10366 X VOL 8 CHAN 10366 BOOK.qxd 11/9/06 11:56 am Page 2 Sir Arnold Bax (1883–1953) Orchestral Works, Volume 8 1 Enchanted Summer 28:04 from Prometheus Unbound (Percy Bysshe Shelley) Anne Williams-King soprano (Faun I) Lynore McWhirter soprano (Faun II) Lebrecht Music & ArtsLebrecht Photo Library Barry Griffiths solo violin Andante con moto – Un poco più mosso – Allegro vivace 2 Walsinghame 16:59 (Sir Walter Raleigh) Martyn Hill tenor Lynore McWhirter obbligato soprano 3 Fatherland 6:50 from The Tales of Ensign Stål (Johan Ludvig Runeberg) Martyn Hill tenor TT 52:07 Brighton Festival Chorus Laszlo Heltay music director Jonathan Grieves Smith assistant music director Royal Philharmonic Orchestra Vernon Handley Arnold Bax 3 CHAN 10366 BOOK.qxd 11/9/06 11:56 am Page 4 during the First World War, when short the composer has tried to render the continual Bax: Orchestral Works, Volume 8 patriotic pieces were in demand. In revising interchange of light and shadow among the green the music in 1934 Bax replaced an extended forest-aisles, and the eternal youth and Theocritan orchestral interlude with the more succinct serenity of the woodland in its early summer We do not usually think of Sir Arnold Bax as a Finnish national anthem. Arnold made a literal ten-bar passage recorded here. foliage. choral composer, for apart from the translation which his brother Clifford worked Enchanted Summer marks the peak of Bax’s The piece opens with a short orchestral unaccompanied Mater, ora Filium of 1921, into a more poetic English version. Arnold later early development. Then his most extended and prelude suggestive, Bax tells us, which with its ecstatic polyphony is sometimes wrote that Runeberg’s was ‘unquestionably the complex work, the manuscript is dated of the profound depths of the great summer cited as his masterpiece, he wrote seven most moving national poem ever composed’. December 1910, but it seems probable that the woodland and of the elfin and unhuman inmates works for chorus and orchestra which, until Yet curiously, though Bax essayed a national music was first conceived in the autumn of of this Arcadian world. Then the wood-spirits, the concerts in 1983 celebrating the song, no doubt with Ireland rather than Finland 1909 and the full score written out at various hovering in a flickering of sunlight and shadow centenary of his birth, were almost completely in mind, he was actually living in the German times during the following year. An advanced among the heavy green branches, begin to sing forgotten. Their revival has thrown new light city of Dresden when he wrote the work, and work for a British composer of that period, it softly, entranced by the undreamed of beauty of on yet another aspect of his art and adds finished it at a time when he was deeply too was written against the background of a the two Nereids who, heedless of all else, drift by, significantly to his stature. involved in the second major love affair of his love affair, which this time had taken Bax to following the voices of their dream. Bax wrote his first choral work, Fatherland, life, having, as he tells us, fled with a ‘tall, Russia. That affair was an unhappy one and As he worked his way towards his mature at twenty-four when he had only actually heard calm-eyed Scandinavian girl’ into a snowbound soon after the work was completed he married, style Bax repeatedly achieved textures and two of his own orchestral scores performed. In Czechoslovakian forest. apparently on the rebound. passages which anticipate what was to come his teens he had visited Norway with his Bax envisaged a strolling ballad singer Bax sets the text of Act Il, Scene 2 of later. This is true of Enchanted Summer, mother, and together with his brother Clifford chanting by a smoky hearth on some northern Shelley’s lyric drama Prometheus Unbound in particularly in its treatment of the orchestra, he became interested in Scandinavian and winter night and surrounded by an entranced three parts, though these play continuously. In which at the very beginning foreshadows the Finnish literature. This enthusiasm may well audience of young and old. The emotional appeal the previous scene, Asia, the spirit of nature opening of his tone poem Tintagel (1917–19) have been stimulated by a family friend, Arne gradually increases, the listeners participating and bride of Prometheus, is taken by her and at its climax parallels that of the last von Erpecum, to whom Fatherland is dedicated. more and more actively in the music until finally sister Panthea to where Prometheus is chained movement of the Sixth Symphony (1934). In The original Swedish text appears with the with linked hand and eyes flashing in the to a rock. The voices of spirits guide the the second part the music becomes more English in the vocal score and may have actually flickering firelight sisters as they pass through the forest. impassioned as Bax evokes the enchanted been set. The poem ‘Vårt Land’ (‘Maamme’ in all are caught up in the emotion of the singer Shelley’s introductory note to Scene 2 mood resulting from the singing of the Finnish, ‘Our Land’ in English) comes from and burst forth into song. Published in 1907 describes the setting: nightingales at midday. Fänrik Ståls Sägner (The Tales of Ensign Stål) in the Avison Edition of the Society of British A Forest intermingled with Rocks and Caverns. At the words ‘There those enchanted eddies by Finland’s national poet, Johan Ludvig Composers, it was first performed in Liverpool Asia and Panthea pass into it. Two young Fauns play’, the full chorus enters for the first time, Runeberg; two stanzas of it, in a setting by in September 1909 as part of the first Music are sitting on a Rock, listening. announcing the third section and suggesting, Fredrik Pacius (dating from 1848), are now the League Festival, and was repeated many times ‘In this first section’, Bax wrote, in Bax’s words, 4 5 CHAN 10366 BOOK.qxd 11/9/06 11:56 am Page 6 the glitter and glory of the strengthening sunlight Raleigh’s poem of the same name was affair with the pianist Harriet Cohen (‘Tania’), The Brighton Festival Chorus, founded for and the vernal force and surge of the youth of introduced to Bax by Philip Heseltine (better which had caused him to leave his wife and the 1968 Brighton Festival by its first Music the year. Finally the Spirits, intoxicated by their known as Peter Warlock) when Bax stayed children at the end of the First World War, had Director and current Conductor Emeritus, own voices, rush headlong and laughing through with him at the Kent village of Eynsford in itself recently undergone a crisis, and, as one Laszlo Heltay, achieved overnight success with the leaves into the distances of the forest. Silence May 1926. Bax’s text departs from the who worshipped youth above almost its very first concert appearance, Sir William falls again. original in fourteen places, suggesting that everything, at forty-two Bax began to realise Walton conducting his Belshazzar’s Feast with But we still have not heard our soloists, and in Heseltine quoted the poem to his friend from what he later referred to as ‘man’s sad fate’. the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Now one of a delightful afterscene the two Fauns memory, a suspicion strengthened by the fact As his subject in most of his poetry Raleigh the most sought-after and versatile choirs in (sopranos) remark on the astonishing things that Bax on the published vocal score does took the Queen herself, adopting the role of the UK, with a busy schedule of year-round they have seen, before remembering that they not ascribe a name to the author of the court favourite playing an elaborate game of concerts, recordings and tours both at home have not milked the goats of Silenus, words, merely writing ‘sixteenth century’. Bax poetic love. His theme in this ballad is his and abroad, it has appeared with all the major whereupon they run off to attend to their dedicated his score to Heseltine. Again, farewell to the court (Queen Elizabeth died in British orchestras and such celebrated duties. though the piece was little performed for 1603). Bax appears to have taken the words conductors as Vladimir Ashkenazy, Leonard Enchanted Summer was performed on many years, its impact in performance was not at face value and the poem probably Bernstein, Seiji Ozawa, Sir André Previn, 13 March 1912, under Arthur Fagge, as the suspected by commentators until encapsulates for him his feelings about Tania Sir Simon Rattle and Leonard Slatkin. Under its opening work in Balfour Gardiner’s celebrated demonstrated by Vernon Handley in the same in the spring of 1926. There are three strands Music Director, James Morgan, the Chorus series of concerts of new British music in broadcast concert in 1983 at which he in Bax’s setting: the dialogue between the achieved its most recent successes performing London’s Queen’s Hall in 1912 and 1913. revived Enchanted Summer. tenor soloist and the chorus (respectively the A Sea Symphony by Vaughan Williams with the Repeated the following year, it then remained Several ballads take as their theme a abandoned lover and the pilgrim); the London Symphony Orchestra and Morning unheard until revived by Leslie Head with the pilgrimage to the Norfolk shrine of wordless vocalising of the chorus (so Heroes by Sir Arthur Bliss with the BBC Stoke-on-Trent Bedford Singers in Southwark Walsingham, the earliest dating from before reminiscent of the then recently premiered Symphony Orchestra at the 2005 Brighton Cathedral in 1977.

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