Sir Arnold Bax - Violin Concerto (1937)
Performed by Lydia Mordkovitch. Conducted by Bryden Thomson with the London Philharmonic Orchestra.
I. Overture, Ballad and Scherzo - 00:00
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| Arnold Bax |
III. Allegro - 26:27
Bax wrote his Concerto for Violin and Orchestra in 1937, completing it in March 1938. That was immediately before he started work on the Seventh Symphony, though the concerto was one of his last extended scores to appear before the public when it was first performed over five years later. Bax wrote this concerto for Heifetz (as the dedication 'To Jascha Heifetz' on the manuscript testifies) but according to William Walton, Heifetz found the music disappointing. Presumably it was not sufficiently virtuosic. Bax did not even acknowledge its existence until, during the war, he received a commission for a new work for St Cecilia's Day, 1943, and produced the concerto for the violinist Eda Kersey to play with the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sir Henry Wood. It was the last time Sir Henry championed a new work by Bax, a composer whom he had first conducted at the 1910 season of London's Promenade Concerts. The concerto was a considerable success though its early promotion was interrupted by the tragic death of the violinist in an air raid in the summer of 1944, soon after her fortieth birthday.
Certainly the work marks a new approach for Bax: comparatively lightly scored, it is charming and romantic in contrast to the 'Sturm und Drang' of the symphonies. When asked to describe it, he remarked 'Well I suppose it's rather like Raff', possibly referring to the Raff of the Cavatina rather than the symphonies. Perhaps the world of the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto is a better parallel. In his first movement Bax develops the concept of a three-movements-in-one form that had been first used in the last movement of the Sixth Symphony in 1934, referring to the opening music as an Overture, and following this with a Ballad and Scherzo.
The opening idea of the slow movement alludes to the Elgar Violin Concerto, though the shape of the music might also be construed as a reference to his friend Benjamin Dale's Piano Sonata of 1905. Later in the movement appears a passage which is in fact orchestrated from a curious piano sonata that Bax wrote the same year: among Bax's papers there survives a manuscript in his own hand of a four movement Sonata in B flat which he called Salzburg, noting on the score 'Paris (conjectured) circa 1788' and 'author unknown'. However, it is clear the music is by Bax, and the Lento espressivo second movement yields the decorated 'Mozartian' second subject idea heard in the slow movement of the Violin Concerto that might be compared to ideas in the post-Second World War concerts of Richard Strauss. For those with the published violin and piano score, note at letter Q the addition of a forty-second cadenza-like passage in double stopping that Bax deleted before publication.
In the finale, a Rondo, the vigorous opening idea is contrasted with a delicious slow waltz. A fast section follows, and again in this movement we have reinstated (at 10 bars after S) a wonderful passage of gossamer running semiquavers reminiscent of the fairy dancing in his tone poem In the Faery Hills, before another passage in waltz time leads to a trumpet solo and the return of the opening idea presaging the rush to the close.
