Arnold Bax: Festival Overture (1909)

In 1988 I purchased the Chandos LP of Bax’s Symphony No.6 (1935). Coupled with this was the Festival Overture. When I bought my first CD player a year or so later, I reinvested and bought the compact disc. Somehow, I never got around to listening to the Festival Overture. It was not until the other day that I put the disk into the player and enjoyed this overblown, but thoroughly enjoyable, festal piece. 

The Festival Overture dates from the autumn of 1909 when Bax was living at Cavendish Square, in London. The piece was first written out in short score but was not completed and orchestrated until 1911 whilst Bax was on honeymoon with Elsita Sobrino in Renvyle, Connemara. Lewis Foreman (Liner Notes CHAN 8586) indicates that Bax only completed the score because of a forthcoming performance at a Balfour Gardiner concert on 27 March 1912. The work was dedicated to the impresario.

This concert featured Bax’s Overture as well as Alexander Borodin’s Polovtsian Dances from Prince Igor and Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto in Bb minor, op.23 (1875/88) with Percy Grainger as soloist. The long concert concluded with a performance of Elgar’s Symphony No.2 in Eb major, op.63 (1911). Balfour Gardiner conducted the New Symphony Orchestra. Foreman has suggested that the reception of the Bax work was thus overshadowed.

In a note for the premiere performance, Bax wrote that the mood of this overture “…shows little formal deviation from the scheme employed by classical writers in compositions of its genre.”  He further adds that the only “divergence from accepted lines will be noticed in the middle of the piece, where in place of the usual short development section, a new melody is introduced of a more serious sustained character than that of the remainder of the work and appearing again in still broader and more triumphant guise towards the close.”  With this exception, the overture “May be said to present the festal spirit in somewhat riotous mood.” On the other hand, the critic Edward J. Dent wrote that “Bax is a clever brat; but what has a born Cockney to do with Celtic Twilights?” and concluded by suggesting that “…his Bohemian overture was like Hampstead people in a Soho restaurant.” (Cited in Liner notes, Naxos 8.570413).

A review of a later performance in the Musical Standard (6 April 1912, p.215) suggested that it was “…a depraved version of Smetana and Dvorak – with a spice of Byng in his best Alhambra mood.” George W Byng was a once popular composer of musical comedies.

It has been a critical axiom that the Festival Overture is scored ‘too heavily.’ This disapproval also applied to Christmas Eve in the Mountains written in 1912. Yet, Foreman writes that both these works are “lusciously scored” and are “effective and strong in personality…” (Foreman, Bax A Composer and his Times, 1983, p.103)

The overriding problem with this exuberant overture is that it does not really sound like Bax. There is nothing here evocative of the Celtic Twilight or the Sibelian grandeur of the North. A more appropriate exemplar for this Overture could be Richard Strauss. There is also the sheer exuberance of Percy Grainger in much of this score.

The Overture was forgotten in the aftermath of the Great War, and apart from an amateur concert revival, was not heard again until Chandos recorded the work in 1988. Since that time, it has been ignored, with no further recordings of this orchestral work have been made.

In 2007, a recording by Ashley Wass and Martin Roscoe was made of the two-piano version, made by another hand than Bax. This had been revived in 1983 during the Bax Centenary Concerts on the BBC.

In 1918, Bax made some revisions to the orchestral score. Graham Parlett (A Catalogue of the Works of Sir Arnold Bax, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1999, p.136) has explained that the differences between the two versions of the Overture “are too numerous to list in detail, [however] they are all very minor and mostly to do with orchestration.”  This revised version was performed at a Royal Philharmonic Society Concert at the Queen’s Hall on 27 February 1919. The conductor was Sir Adrian Boult. At that event, the audience also heard the premiere performance of the first five movements of Holst’s The Planets.

The Festival Overture has remained unpublished, although a set of parts is available from Chappell & Co.

The London Philharmonic Orchestra under Bryden Thomson recording has been uploaded to YouTube.

Discography:
Bax, Arnold, Festival Overture (1918), Symphony No.6 (1935) London Philharmonic Orchestra/Bryden Thomson, Chandos LP: ABRD 1278; Tape Cassette: ABTD 1278; CD: CHAN 8586 (1988); CHAN 9168 (1993); CHAN 10158 (2003).
Bax, Arnold, Music for two pianos, Festival Overture, Ashley Wass and Martin Roscoe, (pianos) Naxos 8.570413 (2007)