Arnold Bax ‒ Piano Sonata No.1 скачать в хорошем качестве

Arnold Bax ‒ Piano Sonata No.1

Arnold Bax (1883 - 1953), Piano Sonata No.1 (1910, Revised 1917-1920) Performed by Ashley Wass Arnold Bax was one of a group of talented young pianist-composers who emerged from London’s Royal Academy of Music in the years immediately after 1900. They included York Bowen, Benjamin Dale and Paul Corder, all pupils of Tobias Matthay for piano and Frederick Corder for composition. At much the same time the pianists Myra Hess, Irene Scharrer, and a little later Harriet Cohen were all Matthay pupils, and of course they played Bax’s music. While Bax took many years to make a career, his contemporary York Bowen was an immediate hit both as pianist and composer and appeared at Queen’s Hall in his own music while still a student. Yet Bowen’s orchestral music is now largely forgotten while Bax is widely known. Much of Bax’s early music must have arisen from improvisation at the piano, an approach that led him to invent harmony which, used in a colouristic way, must then have sounded startlingly modern. His inspiration was the new piano music of the Russians, especially Scriabin, and his habit, in the days before recording or broadcasting, of playing recent orchestral scores at the piano, often as a duet with his friend the pianist Arthur Alexander, was a powerful influence. They played through Glazunov’s symphonies in this way, indulging in all manner of pianistic ‘in jokes’ with each other – friends said they should go on the halls as ‘Bax and Frontz’. Bax’s preoccupation with the piano led him to write many songs whose headlong accompaniments, complex and virtuosic, tell us a lot about Bax the pianist in his early twenties. In this ‘Russian’ sonata, colouristic effects abound, particularly at the bottom of the keyboard. The dark-hued images that Bax conjures certainly appear to have been written with some other palette in mind than the black and white of the piano. The characteristics of the music that strike one immediately are its passion and its onward sweep, developing the material organically into a large-scale structure. In this work Bax does not offer us musical picture postcards as he does in the short, Russian-oriented, May Night in the Ukraine which he wrote in 1912 and dedicated to his female companions in Russia ‘Olga and Natalie’. The ‘broad and triumphant’ coda is punctuated by a vivid pianistic impression of the wild pealing of Russian cathedral bells, the bells that Bax heard as he first arrived in St Petersburg. Frank Merrick has suggested that ‘the bells in Bax’s coda may well have been inspired by those of the Cathedral of St Isaac ... I was there for a fortnight in that very year ... and had hardly reached my room in an hotel when those wonderful bells did their remarkable performance, twice in close succession. Bax does not use the actual motif with which the tiny bells began and ended, but what he has written has several points which lead me to think that it was from the bells of this very Cathedral that he was helped to plan his superb ending to the sonata.’