Bax: String Quartet no. 1; String Quartet no. 2
Maggini Quartet
Naxos 8.555282. Recorded dates and venue not listed. CD.
Here is a puzzle. The First Quartet dates from 1918—the last year of the Somme, of Passchendaele, of a generation’s systematic obliteration in the mud of Flanders. And yet what Bax wrote is sun-drenched, almost absurdly carefree, throwing off gorgeous tunes the way a good fire throws off sparks. Three movements, each one bubbling with Dvořákian warmth and harmonic mischief. You will find yourself whistling the themes afterward, probably in public, probably without shame.
The Maggini players sound as though they love every bar.
That matters more than it sounds. The outer movements generate a genuine Viennese bustle—the kind of thing that makes you think of Schubert on a particularly inspired afternoon—and the Rondo carries a spectral undercurrent beneath all that surface gaiety. Around the three-minute mark of the third track, a melody appears that stops you cold. One of those tunes that feels simultaneously inevitable and miraculous. I won’t try to describe it further. Just listen.
Potton Hall was a shrewd choice of venue. The acoustic is warm without being syrupy, and the Naxos engineers have caught the quartet’s inner voices with a clarity that the earlier Chandos release—still available, and not without merit—doesn’t quite match. The Magginis also do something subtler with the lento passages: they let the music breathe without letting it sag, which is harder than it sounds and which many ensembles get wrong.
Now. The Second Quartet is an entirely different proposition.
Written in 1925, contemporaneous with the Second Symphony, this is Bax for the already committed—the sort of work you come to after you’ve lived with the First Quartet, the Piano Quintet, the symphonies. It shares the Second Symphony’s vertical complexity, its layered counterpoint, but lacks that work’s melodic generosity. Not an ingratiating piece. The contrast with its companion on this disc is, frankly, startling—almost jarring, as if two entirely different composers had been invited to the same party and arrived in different centuries.
What it reminded me of, oddly enough, was Eugene Goossens—specifically By the Tarn and the First Quartet. That same knotted, slightly airless modernism, the harmonic language reaching toward something that doesn’t quite resolve into comfort. Bax connoisseurs will find real rewards here. Others may find the complexity takes its toll before the music fully opens up.
The Chandos alternative couples the Second Quartet with the Piano Quintet—one of Bax’s ten or so greatest works, and worth mentioning precisely because it shows something important: that Bax’s wartime music wasn’t all sunshine. The Piano Quintet is epic, tragic, emotionally devastating. The carefree First Quartet was the exception, not the rule. Context matters.
Lewis Foreman’s liner notes are everything you’d want—readable, factually grounded, opinionated in the best sense.
The First Quartet alone justifies the purchase. The Second will reward patience and repeated hearings, though it demands both. This was among last year’s finest chamber recordings, and the prospect of the Maggini tackling the Third Quartet—a work of genuine symphonic ambition and scale—is something to anticipate with real eagerness.
Bargain of the Month.
