Sir Arnold BAX (1883-1953)

 

Piano Sonata No. 1

Piano Sonata No. 2

Dream In Exile: Intermezzo

Burlesque

Nereid

In a Vodka Shop

 

Ashley Wass (piano)

 

“A very special, precious talent … I am sure that for music, the future is safe in Wass’s hands.” The Independent

 

This is the first disc in a series devoted to the complete piano music of Arnold Bax, presented in outstanding performances by the young British pianist Ashley Wass. Only the second British pianist in 20 years to reach the finals of the Leeds Piano Competition (in 2000), Ashley Wass was also the first British pianist ever to win the top prize at the World Piano Competition in 1997.

 

Bax’s early life was dominated by the keyboard and in his twenties he appeared in concerts playing his own music. His solo piano music consists of four big-boned sonatas written between 1910 and 1934, a couple of dozen highly characteristic shorter pieces many of them technically in the shadow of Debussy or Scriabin, a sonata that in 1922 became his First Symphony, and alternative versions of orchestral works and short late piano pieces unpublished in his lifetime.

 

Here we present the first two Piano Sonatas (of seven in total), both of them composed in a turbulent Lisztian single movement, plus the impressionistic Nereid and the pastiche Russian vignette In a Vodka Shop, both dedicated to the pianist Harriet Cohen. Completing the programme are the Burlesque, possibly a response to what Bax had heard at the Russian Ballet; and Dream in Exile, a sumptuously elegiac piece written in February 1916 and championed by Myra Hess.

 

Naxos 8557439