Photograph: Keystone Features/Getty Images
There may currently be no less fashionable music than the hyper-romantic symphonies and orchestral works of Arnold Bax. The British composer’s music featured in pretty well every Proms season throughout the 1930s and 40s and early 50s, yet he has been the rarest of visitors to the Royal Albert Hall since then. When was the last Bax symphony heard at the Proms, you ask? 2011! Far too long for a fan like me (and Ken Russell), and – well, perhaps not long enough for others.
Bax was born in 1883 in London to a family so wealthy that he was able to devote himself to the single-minded pursuit of his passions. He was a brilliant pianist and, as a composer, he could transform his creative and personal obsessions into every bar of his music. That meant the exoticism of Russia in his early years and, later, the romance and fantasy of the Celtic Twilight (Bax even assumed a pseudonym, Dermot O’Byrne, to write Irish-inspired poetry), and the landscapes of north-west Scotland. His romantic infatuations were just as intense and colourful.
