November Woods

In the autumn of 1916 Arnold Bax was in the first throes of an adulterous love affair with the pianist Harriet Cohen. They shared afternoons of passion in a hotel in the Chiltern Hills, north of London; on one occasion, walking from the railway station to the hotel, they sheltered from a sudden rainstorm in a nearby wood. Bax wrote a poem about that moment: “Down the wet hill we stepped towards the flare;/Storm, a mad painter’s brush, swept sky and land/With burning signs of beauty and despair…”. A year later, in November 1917, Bax rendered that same experience into a sweeping symphonic poem for large orchestra. November Woods begins with a poetic evocation of that bare, gale-lashed forest under the glowing colours of a late autumn sunset. But other emotions begin to surface: first idyllic, then dangerously turbulent, before the wind dies and the storm passes.