Diehard admirers of Arnold Bax’s music maintain that he is one of the neglected greats of 20th-century British music, a composer whose time will come again. More sceptical admirers find that some of his works, the symphonies particularly, never quite deliver on what they promise, and that the best of Bax is to be found in some of his smaller-scale works, such as the triptych of tone poems he composed during the first world war. Even those, though, don’t get the performances they deserve, but Sakari Oramo began his latest BBC Symphony Orchestra concert with the first of them, The Garden of Fand.
Inspired by an episode in Irish mythology, it’s a wonderfully vivid depiction of the power of the Atlantic Ocean, combining what Bax had learnt from Debussy and Ravel’s orchestral writing with his own rather British knack of coming up with a naggingly memorable tune at just the right moment. Oramo kept the surging colours bright and crystalline, there was no trace of impressionist vagueness, and more than enough, certainly, to hope he’ll now tackle November Woods and Tintagel, the other works in the wartime trilogy.
Oramo’s Elgar is a much better-known quantity, and he followed his Barbican account of the Second Symphony three months ago with an equally fine performance of the First. His reading goes on maturing and deepening, without losing any of the ferocious energy of the outer movements. What seemed new here was the beauty of the pianissimos, the way in which Oramo had persuaded the strings to fine down their sound almost to vanishing point, and which gave added intensity to the slow movement and to the lyrical interlude that precedes the symphony’s final affirmation.
In between, the BBCSO’s current artist-in-association, Brett Dean, was the soloist in his own Viola Concerto. The orchestra gave the work its premiere 11 years ago, and it wears extremely well. It’s a wonderful showcase not only for Dean’s talents as a viola player, but also for the immense fertility of his orchestral imagination and his ability to build and sustain large-scale musical structures of dramatic weight and lyrical power.
• On BBC iPlayer until 13 May.
