Bax: November Woods

'This recording makes a splendid follow-up to Vernon Handley’s set of the complete Bax symphonies: here some of the composer’s most powerful orchestral writing receives committed, full-blooded performance, the complex textures ideally balanced and recorded.' Calum MacDonald - BBC Music Magazine

“…some of the composer's most powerful orchestral writing receives utterly committed, full-blooded performance, the complex textures ideally balanced and superbly recorded.” BBC Music Magazine, May 2006 *****

“In the Faery Hills and The Garden of Fand are among Bax's loveliest and most loveable creations, and though the windswept November Woods is far less tuneful, its emotional undercurrents run unfathomably deep. Bryden Thomson's shimmering, sensuous interpretations of these scores, recorded for Chandos some 20 years ago, laid bare the music's Impressionist roots; Vernon Handley (in an encore to his Gramophone Award-winning set of Bax's symphonies – see page 115) takes a tougher, more vigorous view. The only place he's notably slower than Thomson is in NovemberWoods, yet how much darker and more ominous are the leaden skies that Handley paints. Indeed, even in such sensitive hands as Boult's, some of the stormier passages sound rather like film music, while Handley's deliberate focus on motivic clarity brings out a Wagnerian grandeur and gravity that strengthen the work's narrative backbone.
In The Garden of Fand and In the Faery Hills Handley adopts brisk tempi, occasionally pushing the music into a kind of giddy ecstasy that makes Thomson's fragrant, graceful readings sound downright languorous. If only the BBC Philharmonic were as flatteringly recorded as Thomson's Ulster Orchestra or, for that matter, the RSNO in David Lloyd-Jones's superb Naxos cycle. Lloyd-Jones's dynamic direction is similar in spirit to Handley's, in fact, and almost as arrestingly characterised – but not quite. This restless, syncopated score may not be top-drawer Bax but the Manchester musicians play it with the fervour of true believers.” Gramophone Classical Music Guide, 2010

“From the grinding dissonances at the outset through to the inconsolable coda, Lloyd-Jones and his orchestra bring out the unremitting toughness of Bax's uncompromising, breathtakingly scored Second Symphony; even the gorgeous secondary material in the first movement offers an occasional shaft of pale, wintry sunlight.
It helps, too, that Lloyd-Jones has clearly thought hard about the task in hand. How lucidly, for example, he expounds the arresting introduction, where the symphony's main building- blocks are laid out before us, and how well he brings out the distinctive tenor of Bax's highly imaginative writing for low wind and brass. The Scottish brass have a field-day.
Lloyd-Jones proves an equally clear-sighted navigator through the storm-buffeted landscape of November Woods, for many people, Bax's greatest tone-poem. Thoroughly refreshing in its enthusiasm and exhilarating sense of orchestral spectacle, this recording has a physical impact and emotional involvement that genuinely compel. A veritable blockbuster.” Gramophone Classical Music Guide, 2010

“November Woods remains the stand-out offering, a performance of thrusting purpose and refreshing involvement…” Gramophone Magazine, Awards Issue 2005

“Sir Adrian was a consistent champion of the composer and an eloquent interpreter of this appealing music” Penguin Guide, 2011 edition