Given Vernon Handley’s passionate, even eccentric (if amiably so) advocacy of the music of Arnold Bax, you might expect these performances to be excellent despite the fact that (Sinfonietta aside) they are hardly necessary and already duplicate existing Chandos catalog items. Certainly there was nothing wrong with Bryden Thomson’s Ulster Orchestra recordings of these tone poems, especially November Woods. Handley is a bit quicker, though not quite as much as David Lloyd-Jones on Naxos, whose interpretations I tend to prefer very slightly on account of their rhythmic muscle, not to mention the more characterful playing of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. The BBC Philharmonic is a very good band, but its principal reeds really lack personality, never mind an attractive tone (a particular liability in In the Faery Hills).
That said, there’s virtually nothing here to criticize. Handley’s shaping of each work is masterful. He never allows the music to degenerate into a shapeless mess (as it has a tendency to do), and he’s extremely attentive to orchestral detail. The Garden of Fand, for example, is superbly pictorial but never muddled. There’s a certain sameness to Bax’s music: the tendency to gussy up simple, diatonic tunes in excesses of non-functional, chromatic harmony and ornamental figuration can have an effect as uncomfortably queasy as that caused by a greasy serving of fish and chips. Handley, to his credit, always preserves the music’s atmosphere while avoiding aural indigestion. It’s also nice to have the late Sinfonietta, a three-movements-in-one piece that sounds just like everything else that Bax wrote. Yes, it’s more of the same, but it’s a nice same. Rich sonics, with particularly impressive deep bass, add much to the impact of the performances.
