Music and Vinyl: Bax - Winter Legends

The music of Arnold Bax has been featured quite a lot (comparatively speaking) in my posts, and for the other music from Bax here you should revisit these pages.

A lot of the Chandos releases of Bax's music were conducted by Bryden Thomson, with either the Ulster Orchestra or, as here, the London Philharmonic Orchestra.

Winter Legends was written around the time of Bax's Fourth Symphony, with the score being ready in 1930, though the first performance wasn't until 1932 when Adrian Boult conducted the BBC Symphony Orchestra with pianist Harriet Cohen - Bax's mistress, for whom he also wrote his Symphonic Variations.

Winter Legends could almost be a symphony, or even a piano concerto. But in its rhapsodic form and the integration of the piano with the orchestra an extended tone poem is perhaps a more apt description if one needs to be made. The music is well described in the sleeve notes to this splendid Chandos recording from 1987 (click on the scan below to read).