Spring Fire, the newest release from SOMM Recordings, highlights the complete music for cello and piano by Arnold Bax (1883–1953), with Alexander Baillie, recognised as one of the finest cellists of his generation, and pianist John Thwaites, his long-time musical partner. The Baillie-Thwaites Duo has capitalised on concert performances of the greatest twentieth-century British music over the last decade, and, with this recording, continues its enduring partnership with SOMM.

The release takes its title from an early masterpiece by Bax, Spring Fire, a Symphony for Orchestra from 1913. Coming from a particularly fruitful period when Bax wrote a series of symphonic poems of consistently high quality, it may well have been inspired by his love for the beautiful young pianist Harriet Cohen. Theirs was a passionate love affair and a fertile artistic partnership that lasted forty years.

Through force of circumstance, not least of which was World War I, Spring Fire was never performed during Bax’s lifetime; but he repurposed the haunting melody from its opening movement, In the forest before dawn, for the slow movement of the Cello Sonata in E flat minor. Performances of this three-movement Cello Sonata are vanishingly rare, which makes the present release all the more important.

The recording opens with a little-known gem, the Folk-Tale for cello and piano. It is a gorgeous work dedicated to the English cellist, Felix Salmond, who gave the first performance at Wigmore Hall on 27 April 1918 with Bax at the piano.

The first two works on this disc are linked to a fantasy world, while the last two are written with formal clarity and concision. In 1933, Bax dedicated his Sonatina for Cello to the legendary cellist, Pablo Casals, and it fulfils its slight brief with barely a repeated note.

The Legend-Sonata was commissioned by and dedicated to the English cellist Florence Hooton. She gave the premiere at Wigmore Hall on 10 November 1943 with Bax’s muse and lover, Harriet Cohen, as the pianist.

The sweeping survey of twentieth-century cello repertoire that the Baillie–Thwaites duo has undertaken for SOMM includes a double CD of Twentieth-Century Sonatas for Cello and Piano (SOMMCD2512) and The British Cello (SOMMCD0175). The Observer has praised “Baillie’s rewardingly intelligent playing … matched by Thwaites’s warm, generous, perfectly judged pianism”; and BBC Music Magazine says “It isn’t just the excellence of Alexander Baillie’s and John Thwaites’s playing, but that they invest each work with the power of utter belief.”

This CD is dedicated to the memory of the Bax scholar Graham Parlett, who, in preparation for this recording, supported the UK performances of these works given by the Baillie–Thwaites duo.