Review by Stephen Morris. I first encountered Bax when I was 14 years old.  Bored rigid by the pop music of the early 1980s, I started pulling records (vinyl, naturally) at random from Wrexham Library - 10p per record per week – until I found out what I really liked. Stumbling upon the Fifth Symphony and then seeking out the others, I never looked back and must have listened to the whole cycle hundreds of times ...

was fortunate to attend Ashley Wass’s Naxos recording of Sir Arnold Bax’s Symphonic Variations with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra at Lighthouse Poole in 2008 and I recall the extraordinary efforts made by the musicians to read their parts from an indecipherable hand-written manuscript that had been partially damaged during a WWII London blitz attack.  Ashley Wass told me he’d love to program the Symphonic Variations for concert performances, but he said no orchestra would schedule the ...

The Bax Website is proud to offer the following article to commemorate the 70th anniversary this month (October 2023) of Sir Arnold Bax’s death by Dr. Claire Colebourn FRCP.  This article is based on a scientific article being published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. Dr. Colebourn is a Consultant Critical Care Physician at University Hospitals Oxford and the current President of the British Society of Echocardiography.

Sheffield in South Yorkshire is a city I have never previously visited and was known to me only as the home of the annual World Snooker championship. But on Saturday 10 June,  it proved the unlikely venue for an even more unlikely concert devoted entirely to English music with Bax’s Third Symphony the pièce de résistance. I can’t remember when I last attended a live performance of it, though I do remember it was at Bax’s ...

Arnold Bax’s Concerto, later the Phantasy, for viola and orchestra, was written for, and dedicated to, the violist Lionel Tertis. It was premiered by him during a Philharmonic Society concert on 17 November 1921. The Phantasy was played several times in the ensuing years but was then largely forgotten until its revival in 1989 by Vernon Handley and Rivka Golani. This essay will examine the context, provide a non-technical description of the music, and examine the ...