Arnold Bax's Symphony No. 2 and the Boston Symphony Orchestra

There’s no doubt that Serge Koussevitzky left an indelible impression upon music of the twentieth century. In his twenty-five years as conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, he commissioned and led a host of works that have become modern classics. During his tenure with the BSO, he brought Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms and Hindemith’s lesser-known Konzertmusik into the world. And with the Koussevitzky Foundation, which the conductor founded in 1942, he commissioned Samuel Barber’s Prayers of Kierkegaard and Copland’s Symphony No. 3. The Koussevitzky Foundation also brought to life Arnold Schoenberg’s Survivor from Warsaw (though the BSO did not premiere this work), Arthur Honegger’s Symphony No. 5, Walter Piston’s Symphony No. 3, and Roy Harris’s Symphony No. 7, among others.

Some of these works go unheard today. One such Koussevitzky commission that has fallen into the dustbin of history is Arnold Bax’s Symphony No. 2, which the conductor led in its world premiere with the BSO on 13 December 1929.

Up until that point, Bax’s music had been something of a rare treat on BSO concerts. Pierre Monteux had introduced Bax’s music to Boston audiences in 1920, when he conducted In the Faery Hills. Monteux also led the orchestra in Bax’s November Woods in December of 1922 and January of 1923. Koussevitzky brought The Garden of Fand to the BSO in April of 1925 and the composer’s Symphony No. 1 in December of 1927.

Bax’s reputation in America and in Britain at the time rested upon his tone poems. Works such as The Garden of Fand and In the Faery Hills drew upon Celtic mythology, a subject close to Bax’s heart ever since he encountered the poetry of W. B. Yeats while he was a student at the Royal Academy of Music. These works bear the imprint of Debussy and Richard Strauss.

Yet his symphonies—Bax wrote seven—are muscular and are shot through with dark, Scriabin-like harmonies and cast with an eye to the internal formal logic that permeates Sibelius’s music. 

Critics and scholars usually prefer to see the first three of Bax’s symphonies as a single musical and emotional process. The First Symphony, completed in 1922, churns with tempestuous themes and dynamic force. Biographers have often viewed this work as a reflection of the First World War and Ireland’s Easter Rising, of which Bax knew several of the fighters. But Robin Hull has stated that, “such a reading can only hamper understanding of what is essentially a subjective work.”

The Second Symphony, which Bax completed in 1926, seems to pick up where the First left off. It is scored for large orchestra, organ, piano, and percussion, and like the First, the symphony is cyclic in form. The introduction presents four motives that serve as germs for the symphony’s thematic material. Bax’s harmony is dense for the first motive. The basses, on G, underpin lower string and bassoon figures in G minor. Trombones add a splash of dissonance with an A-flat. The second motive is a fanfare figure in the English horn and bassoon; the third is a series of murky rising arpeggios in the bass. The final motive is another fanfare, but this time set in flutes and trumpets.

The heart of the symphony is the second movement, where strings and winds unwind a lyrical theme. Debussyian washes of color, heard through celesta and harp, provide moments of stasis. The final movement (all of the Bax’s symphonies are cast in three movements) recalls the four motives of the introduction, and the symphony ends with an uneasy peace that is further explored and brought to a more satisfying conclusion in the Third Symphony (1928-1929).

The premiere of Bax’s Second Symphony in Boston’s Symphony Hall must have been successful enough for Koussevitzky to take the work on the road. He conducted the symphony on 9 January and 8 February in New York’s Carnegie Hall.

Since then, the work, in Boston anyway, has fallen into obscurity. Indeed, Bax’s music no longer graces BSO programs. Although the Boston Pops performed selections from Bax’s film score to Oliver Twist in 2008, the Boston Symphony Orchestra hasn’t performed any of Bax’s music since 1946, when Adrian Boult led Tintagel. It seems to be high time for the orchestra to take another look at this important and unduly neglected British composer.