Fand IncWessex Press

Foreword

During 1912–13, Bax wote a set of Four Orchestral Pieces with the titles Pensive Twilight, Dance in the Sun, From the Mountains of Home and The Dance of Wild Irravel. Each movement is scored for different forces, ranging from strings and harp (No. 3) to full orchestra (No. 4). Writing to his friend Arthur Alexander, Bax remarked that the latter ‘will sound like Armageddon—a complete battery of percussion, and castanettes [sic] clucking like a self complacent hen … [;] the gentle and refined melancholy of the first piece [Pensive Twilight] will set it off well.’ The first performance of the Four Orchestral Pieces was given on 20th March 1914 by the Queen’s Hall Orchestra under Geoffrey Toye, and fourteen years later Bax decided to revise them, omitting the last one and retitling the others, while slightly reducing the orchestration and making a few cuts. In this new version, entitled Three Pieces for Small Orchestra, Pensive Twilight was renamed Evening Piece and premièred by an ad hoc orchestra under Malcolm Sargent at a children’s concert in Central Hall, Westminster on 1st December 1928. John Mitchell’s arrangement for piano is of the original version, the manuscript of which is in the British Library (part of Add. MS 50175).

—Graham Parlett

A note from the arranger

What appears in this publication is not the first time a movement from this Bax orchestral work has been arranged for piano, as it is known that Philip Heseltine (more familiar as the composer Peter Warlock) made a piano transcription of the third movement, From the Mountains of Home. The circumstances of how his arrangement came into being have not been identified, but as the Four Orchestral Pieces were unpublished (and still are at the time of writing), it is reasonable to assume Arnold Bax must have allowed Heseltine to borrow his manuscript score at some point. However, whether Bax approved of Heseltine’s arrangement, or even knew about it, has not been recorded.

With such a precedent existing, the necessary encouragement was thus on hand for other of the four movements to be arranged for piano. The first to be tackled was Dance in the Sun (also published by Fand Music Press), and Pensive Twilight which followed was equally problematic to adapt into pianistic guise because of Bax’s texturally quite complex orchestral writing. The only thing added that is not in the original is the poco rit. direction at bar 134, where it was felt a slight slowing down was appropriate before a reprise of the earlier thematic material played fortissimo.

—John Mitchell

The manuscript of this hitherto unpublished piece, completed on 17th October 1913, has the word ‘Sonata’ centred at the top of the first page, and on the left-hand side of the next line: ‘No 2 Scherzo’, the numeral clearly referring to the movement rather than to the work as a whole. The rest of the sonata (if it ever existed) is no longer extant, though, since it is in the relative major (F), there may be some connection with Bax’s lost Sonata in D minor, the first movement of which was performed by Myra Hess at the Æolian Hall in London on 2nd June 1911 as part of the Fourth Congress of the International Musical Society; but there is no evidence to confirm this connection or to suggest that the Scherzo was ever played in public during Bax’s lifetime. Its first known performance was given, from a copy of the manuscript, by Malcolm Binns in Studio No 1, Abbey Road, on 9th September 1981 as part of a recording session for Pavilion Records (issued on LP SHE 565).

On 7th June 1917 Bax completed an orchestration of the score, and in this form it was first played by the Queen’s Hall Orchestra under Sir Henry Wood at a Promenade Concert given on 3rd September 1919. The following year Julius Harrison conducted the London Symphony Orchestra in its second performance at the Empire Theatre, Cardiff on 27th May 1920 as part of the South Wales Festival. It was around this time too that Bax made a slightly truncated arrangement of the work for pianola, which was issued by the Aeolian Company in the autumn of 1921. According to the pianolist Rex Lawson, in his notes for a CD reissue (NMCD136),

Bax’s Scherzo was the most popular of Aeolian’s 1921 series of composed and arranged rolls, to judge from the number of copies which have survived. To put this in perspective, perhaps three or four original rolls of the Casella pieces [Trois pièces] are known to survive, whereas the Bax is probably represented by a couple of dozen copies.

In the winter of 1933 the composer revised his orchestral version under the new title Symphonic Scherzo, but it remained unplayed in this form until Vernon Handley and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra recorded it for Chandos at All Saints’ Church, Tooting, on 3rd January 1986.

—Graham Parlett

Foreword

Dance in the Sun is the second of Four Orchestral Pieces that Bax wrote in 1912–13, the others being Pensive Twilight, From the Mountains of Home and The Dance of Wild Irravel. The first complete performance was given by the Queen’s Hall Orchestra under Geoffrey Toye on 20th March 1914, but they then remained unplayed as a set for one hundred years, when Sir Andrew Davis recorded them with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra in May 2014 (available on Chandos CHAN 10829). In the meantime, in 1928, Bax had revised them as Three Pieces for small orchestra, omitting the fourth number and renaming the others: Dance in the Sun was transposed from E major to F and became Dance in the Sunlight. The manuscript of the original Four Orchestral Pieces was presented to the British Library by Harriet Cohen in 1960 (Add. MS 50175) and forms the basis for the present arrangement.

—Graham Parlett

A note from the arranger

What appears in this publication is not the first time a movement from this Bax orchestral work has been arranged for piano, as it is known that Philip Heseltine (more familiar as the composer Peter Warlock) made a piano transcription of the third movement, From the Mountains of Home. The circumstances of how his arrangement came into being have not been identified, but as the Four Orchestral Pieces were unpublished (and still are at the time of writing), it is reasonable to assume Arnold Bax must have allowed Heseltine to borrow his manuscript score at some point. However, whether Bax approved of Heseltine’s arrangement, or even knew about it, has not been recorded.

With such a precedent existing, the necessary encouragement was thus on hand for another of the four movements to be arranged for piano. On a personal note, having for many years much admired and enjoyed Neville Dilkes’s pioneering 1971 recording of Dance in the Sunlight, when I was approached by Fand Music Press about making a transcription of it for piano, accordingly I was very pleased to take up the challenge. Of great assistance here was having access to Graham Parlett’s fairly recently typeset score of the 1912/13 version of Dance in the Sun to work from.

Bax’s orchestral music is often texturally quite complex, and arranging it for piano threw up several instances where awkward decisions had to be made about what to keep in and what to leave out. It is hoped what appears here represents the best options at points where these difficult choices were involved. The uppermost consideration I focused on throughout was that in its new pianistic guise the piece should be allowed to dance along allegro vivo just as Bax had intended!

—John Mitchell

FOREWORD

Carey Blyton was one of my tutors when I was a student at the Guildhall School of Music in the 70s. We got on well, so I kept in touch with him for most of the ensuing period up until his death in 2002. I regularly put on performances of several of his works, including Sweeney Todd and Dracula, and conducted the first performance of his Frankenstein whilst at St Helen and St Katherine, Abingdon.

It was whilst there that I asked him for a unison song and he sent me a photocopy of a manuscript of his: Robin Redbreast. Sometime in 1998 or ’99 my Junior Choir gave a performance of the piece, and in late 1999 it was published and dedicated to me.

The melody has a simple charm, and in memory of Carey I have written this piece which is aimed, as I think he may have approved, at the competent but probably amateur pianist.

As an anecdote, I must add an example of Carey’s humour. He telephoned a week after posting the song to me and asked me if I had “received the blood-y shed”. This quite threw us until I realised that the last words of the piece are “…and of the blood he shed”!

The piece spans out as follows:

There is a mysterious introduction in Carey’s original C minor, or really F minor without the D flat. The theme is then stated and slightly re-harmonised from the original. Moving into F major it is to be found in 5/4 time and played backwards.

The next invention, also in F, plays with the theme, and is partially canonic.

There follows a Lento section which quotes a melody from Carey’s song cycle setting French texts, Toi et Moi, opus 11. The third song is entitled Mea Culpa, which I thought would act as an apology to Carey, if he is watching over my shoulder, to what am I going to do to his serious tune, and that is to turn it into a tango, ultimately a habañera. In fact he enjoyed tangos and wrote quite a number.

Once my tango, in E minor, is over, the opening idea returns and ends the piece thoughtfully in something like the original key.

I hope you, the player, and Carey, the inspirer, like what I have done.

Gary Higginson
17th July 2015

UPDATE: We are delighted to be able to present here a video recording of this entire concert. Please see below.

A free recital including world première piano performances of music by Sir Arnold Bax and Peter Thompson, featuring the original version of Bax’s tone poem Nympholept, played by:

• Philip Mead, piano

In this concert Philip will be giving the first performance of the original piano version of Sir Arnold Bax’s Nympholept. Of the group of elaborate scores written around the time of The Garden of Fand and Tintagel, and inhabiting a similarly enchanted world, is Nympholept—later, of course, orchestrated. This work was never played in Bax’s lifetime in either its orchestral or piano guise. Unlike its more celebrated counterparts (November Woods, Tintagel etc.), this tone poem was originally conceived by Bax for piano solo.

Fand Music Press has now published this work in its original piano format. It was the International Piano Choice for that magazine’s March/April 2014 edition, and Philip Mead’s recital, significantly, will feature its first public performance.

Mead trained with Vivian Langrish at the RAM in the 1960s, and so is well-seasoned in the English music piano tradition (especially the music of Sir Arnold Bax and Frank Bridge). What is particularly fascinating about him as a virtuoso is that he is also a well-respected pioneer of performing more modernist scores. His Charles Ives disc won 5 stars, both for performance and sound, and was considered the top performance available of the Ives Sonata (“…a most desirable disc … Mead would be hard to beat” —BBC Music Magazine). More can be found about this pianist at www.philipmead.com.

Date & Venue

Date:	Friday, 6th November 2015 at 1:10 pm
Venue:	Mumford Theatre
	Anglia Ruskin University
	East Road
	Cambridge CB1 1PT
Tel.:	01223 352932
Web:	www.anglia.ac.uk/mumfordtheatre
	www.facebook.com/MumfordTheatre

Tickets

Entry to this event is FREE!

Watch the full concert

The entire concert was recorded, and may be viewed in full either on this page or in a playlist on YouTube.

Programme details

* = Première performance. Note that most of the pieces are published by Fand Music Press; click on the linked titles below to go to the page for the related sheet music.