Nonet Oboe quintet ; Elegiac trio ; Clarinet sonata ; Harp quintet

Abstract

A RNOLD BAX wrote his first work for chamber ensemble m 1903 (a student string quartet) and his last in 1945 (his Piano Trio). In the intervening forty years or so he L composed a wide variety of chamber music ranging from sonatas with piano accompaniment (or in two cases with harp accompaniment) through trios, quartets and quintets to works for larger forces including a sextet with cor anglais, harp and string quartet; a septet ('Concerto for Seven Instruments') for flute, oboe, harp and strings; an octet with horn, piano and strings, and the Nonet presented here. The music on this recording was written at the very peak of Bax's powers between 1916 and 1934. Bax is, of course, well known as the master of the romantic orchestra, developing a brilliant technique in the wake of the composers who wrote for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, particularly Stravinsky, Debussy and Ravel. Over nearly fifty years Bax wrote over eighty vibrant and colourful scores requiring the orchestra, including seven symphonies and a notable corpus of evocative tone poems. Yet while his chamber works do not always paint on quite the scale of his orchestral music, Bax composed with a sure ear for instrumental colour and atmosphere, a sensibility signalled most noticeably when he added the harp to his ensemble. In fact in his chamber music Bax was often writing for particular players whose technique, in the 1920s, coloured his instrumental technique. Thus when in the mid-1920s Maria Korchinska, a harpist trained in the long-standing Russian tradition, appeared on the scene (Bax got to know her in 1926 and 1927) Bax's harp writing tended to change from the style he had earlier adopted when the English harpist Gwendolen Mason, trained in the French school, was his ideal. Thus, in the works here recorded, Mason would have informed the Harp Quintet, Korchinska the Nonet.