BAX. Symphony No. 1 in E flat major.

London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Myer Fredman. Lyrita

SRCS53 (JJ234). Recorded in associ ation with Ken Russell Productions Ltd.

Bax's symphonies continue to provoke controversy and many musicians sympathetic to his musical language find their invention less richly poetic and their argument less effectively sustained than that of the tone poems. It is true that they do not command the organic cohesion and integration we associate with the symphonic discipline and are not so finely proportioned as his wartime tone-poems, Tintagel and The Garden of Fand, but they nonetheless have a breadth of vision and boldness of imagination that the tone poems do not command. It is their wild, brooding fantasy and their vividness of detail and colouring that more than offsets the grandiloquence and self-indulgence that afflicts them in their less successful moments.

The First Symphony began life as a sonata for piano (it would have been the third) and apparently the first movement is directly scored from this piano sketch, the other two movements being wholly new. He began it in the autumn of 1921, completing it the following year and it was sufficiently well thought of in its day to represent this country at the 1924 ISCM Festival in Prague in the days when that organisation was somewhat less sectarian than it has become in the last decade or so, and when music of widely diverging styles could co-exist on its platform. The symphony still reflects the fascination that Russian music exerted on him (Bax had visited Russia in 1910), an example of which is the main motive of the work or the passage just before fig. A in the finale. The first movement falls into the normal sonata pattern with a highly characterised martellato main motive and a contrasting lyrical second group. A lovely idea, incidentally. The movement is tauter than the corresponding movements of the Third and Fourth symphonies and there is abundant evidence of the richness, originality and quality of his invention. The slow movement hasn't the breadth of canvas as that of the Second Symphony nor quite so powerful an atmosphere but it is still impressive for all that in its orchestral resource and the distinctive personality of the ideas. The finale is perhaps the least distinguished of the three movements in the quality and freshness of its invention. Indeed the ending is a bit overblown. But even if this is not the equal of the Second and Third symphonies, it is still a thoroughly rewarding piece.

The performance under Myer Fredman is no less excellent than was that of the Second and the LPO acquit themselves with as much distinction. It says much for his persuasive advocacy that the orchestra sound as if they had been playing the work all their lives. The recording is superb: in clarity of detail, presence and impact it would be difficult to better. Indeed it is one of the finest orchestral recordings to have come my way in recent months. R. L.