BAX: Sinfonietta, ...

Slovak Philharmonic Orchestra, Wordsworth, Barry

8.555109

Bax wrote his one-movement, three-sectioned, Sinfonietta in May 1932 and called it Symphonic Phantasy. Although not on the scale of his symphonies, this music has a special personality all its own and most of Bax’s most characteristic fingerprints may be found in it. In its variety and colourful and ever-changing orchestral textures it quickly absorbs one into Bax’s varied and suddenly changing moods. The music plays continually, the opening theme acting as something of a motto, returning in the middle section, while the dramatic fast passage which follows contains the seeds of the ideas used in the closing section. As in the Rondo of the other work here included, this last movement reflects the end of Bax’s emotional spectrum, throwing the more sombre and reflective earlier sections into sharp relief, though occasionally the music starts to slip into a more brooding mood. Quickly it all changes into fast music marked Gaily before the triumphal climax with which it ends. • The Overture, Elegy and Rondo dates from the summer of 1927 and thus falls between Bax’s Second and Third Symphony. Although published in 1938, the stock of scores was later destroyed in a fire at his publisher’s and it has never been widely available. The opening Overture has occasionally been heard on its own, detached from the complete work, and in its opening theme Bax comes the nearest he ever came to encompassing the then fashionable neo-classicism. He described this opening passage as ‘suggestive of an 18th-century concerto’, but the long dreamy middle-section melody is pure Bax. The central Elegy opens in a mood that Bax described as being ‘a little spectral’, and after a climax leads us to quiet music which Bax wants played ‘in the manner of a cradle song’.

CD x 1

Naxos

16.06.2003

747313510924