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This Chandos disc with the English String Quartet joined by John McCabe and Skaila Kanga was one of the earliest recordings of Arnold Bax's chamber music released as a digital CD. I'm glad to say it has been joined by many more but I still have an affection for this recording. The program may seem a bit short by current standards but when the disc was released in 1984 this was the standard length before technological advances made eighty minute discs possible. The recording was never remastered after this pressing but Chandos's sound was excellent from the beginning. Chandos remastered the various orchestral works in nine volumes to gather them together as well as to bring out more of the orchestral detail, something essential to those large scale pieces but unnecessary for chamber music.The three works here were all composed as the Great War ended and Bax found himself becoming a major new name in British classical music. This was also a time when the composer, who had an enormous love of Ireland, was still emotionally reeling from the disaster of the Easter Rising of 1916. The first two works are written in a style that combined Impressionism with his own style of modernism while the third is almost purely Romantic. The first two works are in are each a single movement, an economy of expression rare for this composer but one that shows that he knew when he had said enough and did not indulge in prolixity for its own sake as some critics complain.The Piano Quartet is the darkest work on the program, in its central section becoming quite agitated, though there are sad and wistful moments of longing or recollection along the way. It's much more bleak than any chamber music he had written up to then and was composed around the same time he was writing the First Symphony, a very rough and powerful work inspired by the plight of Ireland and possibly also the troubles in his marriage, the death of his father and the War itself in which he lost many friends. it is still a work of great beauty in its own way and quite accessible. It was later reworked as the Saga Fragment for piano and orchestra for Harriet Cohen to play on her American Tour.The Harp Quintet has become one of the composer's most recorded works. I have three recordings without even trying to accumulate comparative versions. i like them all and can only say this recording seems a bit darker and more "solid" if that makes sense. It is a product of the same troubled time as the Piano Quartet though more mournful than agitated. it's written in a more impressionistic and less modern style than the quartet and the harp sometimes suggests a bardic tale being sung. Though a relatively dark work it has its own ethereal beauty.the String Quartet No. 1 is something entirely apart from the other two works. it is actually his third string quartet but he scrapped the two earlier ones which were written in his student days at the Royal Academy. He did preserve the slow movement of the second, scoring it for orchestra as the early tone poem, Cathaleen-ni-Hoolihan. Bax is said to have written it to defy those who said his music was over-scored and too complicated It is genial, warm and as it opens one can only think of Dvorak, especially in his Quartet No.12 "American". the first movement is particularly sunny and it's no surprise this became one of the most played chamber works written after the war. The second movement is melancholy but lacks the bleakness of the two earlier works. The third movement marked Allegro vivace is a spirited folk dance again in a Dvorak-like mood. Though Bax claimed that all the themes are original, some people including Lewis Foreman (who wrote the booklet notes) and early Bax biographer Colin Scott-Sutherland feel it is an (unconscious perhaps) adaptation of the folk song, Fanaid Grove. One has only to listen to the section that begins at 3:20 and Fanaid Grove itself (better in an instrumental version for comparison) to find that the music is identical.
