"Tintagel", by Arnold Bax (1883-1953) 

Beautiful piece of music for a beautiful part of the country and the last piece of music played at my dad's funeral.

I live in Tintagel. Walk the cliffs between Boscastle and trebarwith strand regularly. The awsome variation in the mood of the sea and the light on the cliffs at different times of year and day are well captured here. And Tintagel is very busy. People chasing the spurious Arthurian legend. But the music speaks to me of the natural grandure rather than the human stories woven into the landscape.

It was hearing Tintagel played on the radio very many years ago that turned me on to Bax. I think this is one of the all-time greatest musical works inspired by the sea. Bax's seven monumental symphonies are also wonderful and deserve much more hearing than they get. I was greatly annoyed that a former organiser of the BBC Proms, obviously not a Bax fan, refused to host his music and said many years ago that 'you can empty a hall by playing Bax'. How stupidly wrong he was!

A book called King Arthur's Britain brought me here and I'm glad it did

A really lucky moment - Several years ago, I was idling past Streatham library (SE London) and saw a blue plaque on the wall with Arnold Bax written, so I returned to the library and requested his CDs. I simply had the time then to do so... Now, the other day I included it in my assembly, here in Kenya. What great music this is, to share and indulge!

It's really weird to know there was music like this back in 1919. Truly amazing! Much different than other composers of that era.

Very very beautiful, I'm really in love with it! Amazing composer, and it's such a shame that his works are so less played in Germany, where I'm from. Hehe.

What a stunning piece & makes me want to vacate London immediately.

The first two minutes nearly brought me to tears, when listening live to the Halle

Perfect tone poem.

a wonderful piece of music, really carries you away.

Wonderful work - deserves to be much better known than it is.

I'm a Bax fanatic and this rendering of Tintagel, both musically and with these images, is stunning. My deepest thanks.

Tintagel - a true musical favorit of mine - in all music, for 40 years now. l bought it on vinyl in 1983. "English tone Pictures" from EMI. Masterclass. 💜

Such a lovely meditation on nature. The composition is technically challenging, but the result is simple beauty.

I love Bax s músic I Love Kings Arthur leyends. Thanks, from Argentina

So glad to have found this treasure!

I lived in Cornwall for 8yrs, two of them in Little Petherick, just near Padstow. I returned to Scotland in 2000, but I still miss Cornwall :-)

Sometimes I'm glad art lives longer than people.

Yes :-) The cliffs of North Cornwall are a perfect setting for these epic legends and, of course, this epic music.

I hear you. The final moments feel like that something utterly stupendous has been achieved: a victory, an ascension. It has a real feeling of resolution, of coming to rest, despite the ear-shattering volume :-)

wonderful images of home…….wonderful piece……close your eyes and you're there

I know what you mean. I left Cornwall to return to Scotland for the Millennium. I haven't been back since, but the memory is always with me. I lived near Padstow and there was something really special about the north coast.

Great orchestral work.When Arthur meet Tristan!!!

This is what I call precise timing--I was just looking for this piece, preferably a good recording and preferably in single-file, and VOILA! Been to Tintagel in Cornwall and it is one impresive and atmospheric ruin, reeks of medieval splendors and battles. I can well believe that Arthur was born there--if he was born anywhere. Bax captures it perfectly, Lloyd-Jones captures Bax, and you've captured the lot. Ta muchly!

terrific music

A remarkable piece. Noble, historic, a tonal succession of serene waves, excluding needless dramaticisms, and (am I wrong?) no use of major popular songs or themes as background. As orchestration, there are coloured fingertips of Debussy or even Ravel, ie late impressionism school, I believe. Thank for sharing. Musical greetings from Portugal.

What a wonderful piece. Bax showed me Tintagel long before I was able to visit it -- and it is just as he described it... Thank you for posting this sublime work.

One of my favourite pieces of symphonic music...

You can hear in the music that Bax was in love with the land and the Atlantic.

You're welcome, Kenneth. I love it too. I used to live in Padstow, just down the coast from Tintagel. Bax nailed it :-)

A very nice presentation - the sequence of images really enhance Bax's fine score. Thanks

Thanks for this. I love this piece.

So powerfull... great work. Thumbs up. Hats off...

An excellent rendition of a wonderful work.

Lovely gentle I enjoyed listening .

You're welcome :-) I love this recording. It builds in size, power and feeling. Beautiful.

You're welcome, Kenneth. I heard this live a couple of years ago. Very powerful!

Thanks dear "Scot Peacock" for the uploading. Fanrastic music, and the pictures are matching perfectly with the music.

Holy shit. Romantic explosion!

Thank you for putting this up Scot. (sound is ok. To just listen is a real treat these days).

Amazing!

Magnificent and evocativ.

Very evocative!

Isn't it great. It really captures the tumult of the waters around the British Isles.

Powerful stuff!

Beautiful x

Laphroig 10 and a bit of Bax's work is a good Wednesday night

The first 5 minutes are great not least when the horns leap out at 1'20". Then the inspiration sadly evaporates.

Magnificent!

Tintagel a mini masterpiece!

This inspires film music.

Bax's greatest compositions, apart from Tintagel, are his remarkable Harp Quintet- a true little-known masterpiece- and the last movement of his 7th Symphony.

A beautiful lively piece, thanks. Personally I’m most in love with “In the Faery Hills” and “The Garden of Fand.”

Makes me think of the incidental music in the 1964 BBC series The Great War.

Sublime, cinematic, suberb!

There's a very good mono recording from 1954 with Boult and the LPO. It's hi-fidelity sound, and the latest reissues do a very good job of unobtrusively bringing the recording very near to modern standards. It was DECCA originally, but I can't remember what the label is now. I added a small amount of reverb to a copy I made, and it ended up sounding very close to a stereo recording. I've known this performance for many decades, and it's still my favourite. Boult knew where the magic lay in this score.

Hey there, so glad you enjoyed it. In my opinion, the top two recordings of Tintagel are by David Lloyd-Jones with the RSNO and Vernon Handley with the BBC Philharmonic. I think the RSNO have the edge in terms of power and thrills, but Handley gets it in the softer moments and the Chandos recording is marginally better than the RSNO's Naxos recording. I'm also biased because I'm Scottish and go to hear the RSNO perform regularly :-) Yes, I loved Tintagel, too. I lived in Cornwall for 8yrs!

Absolutely! In 3D widescreen :-)

Gorgeous.

Tintagel is a symphonic poem composed by Arnold Bax in 1919; it is perhaps his best-known orchestral work. Bax had visited Tintagel Castle during the summer of 1917, accompanied by pianist Harriet Cohen, with whom he was carrying on an affair at the time; he dedicated the work to her. He composed two poems on the theme, and the work is, to a certain extent, a sonic illustration of these. According to Bax, the music is meant to depict a castle perched high on the rocks, battered on a sunny summer day by the Atlantic Ocean. A certain Celtic flavour is apparent in the music; this provides the basis for one of the two themes in the work, meant to recall King Arthur and his connection to the castle, and which quotes a motif from Richard Wagner's opera Tristan und Isolde;[1] the other theme depicts the sea. The piece contains three sections. The first and last sections are somewhat grandiloquent, the first presenting the two main themes and the third a varied reprise:. in between these, there is a “development”. A typical performance of Tintagel lasts around fifteen minutes. Tintagel was premiered in Bournemouth on 20 October 1921.

Charming but always forgotten piece

Yes, Bax is shamefully neglected. He needs some TLC I think.

@Raymond Deane :-) I hear you. We have a three week long festival up here called Celtic Connections. Fiddles and bodhrans are only a fraction of it!

I adore this, very atmospheric, ethereal. The thematic changes and how he orchestrates reminds me of Richard Strauss.

I haven't heard Boult's second reading but I'll look it out. By the sounds of things he loved to finish it with a final mighty crash of waves :-)

Love this, especially the quiet theme starting around 2:35.

@Mike Emerson It really captures the swell and majesty of the sea, as well as the epic , romantic heart of your best adventure stories :-)

A marvelous reading. Really appreciate the clarity and legibility of the orchestral texture and a grand, nobility in this rendition as though Nature is the narrator and When man, King Arthur or Tristan & Isolde, are invoked, a tangible, yet tempered emotion filtered through the ages, is evoked through this narrative, as though again from a distance and as being part of nature. Quite beautiful. Lloyd-Jones is able to resist exaggerating or getting carried away with the sentiments and it works well. I far prefer the recorded sound to, say his 5th Symphony recording which isn't as homogenous and natural.

@Lion desDunes Ha ha, that's a great alternative title. Sums it all up :-)

It's astonishing to think that he was neglected for some time after his death.

The late Myer Fredman I recorded his first two symphonies en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myer_Fredman A beautiful composition thank you for posting it.

Blame it on me but if as much as I heard and like so much all Bax orchestral pieces, for whatever reason Tintagel always slipped through my hands. And now, finally here I am... and maybe because I read so much enthusiastic comments, I exceeded my expectation. Fine, grandiose, you may feel the Round Table horns, the horses teepetting to battle, the slipping out the sword from the rock, Merlin and his magic interventions, but...something is missing. A dialogue with nature instead? Hmm, we have at least 2 or 3 pieces of good New Age pieces dealing with the same rocky- magic-sea scenarios, with the Guenevre robe floating against the breezes, and so forth. Yes, a good Symphonic Poem etc but for instance, look to Spring Fire... Clearly superior.

indeed yes, i do….i live to play

Dream of Olwyn? I'll look out for that. Thanks for the recommendation :-) What other pieces would you recommend? Are you from Cornwall?

It's funny, in Bax's day, the area around tintagel was very busy….very noisey…not like it is today…..very industrious…Glebe just round the corner Dunder hole a little further, near the youth hostel. In fact that was the office for the quary ….further on is Lanterdan quary near trabarwith strand....quarries all round….right on the cliff edges as it was easy to load the ships that way…with slate…..I used to spend most of my teen years out on those cliffs exploring

@slothropgr Ha ha. I knew there had to be some celtic blood in you to respond so deeply to this piece of music. We can be expressed in many ways - it's not all fiddlin' Strip the Willows or Eightsome Reels. Mind you, I love a good ceilidh, now and then :-D Where was your granddad from? I'm originally from Arbroath, a fishing town on the north east coast, between Dundee and Aberdeen. We have lower temperatures than Glasgow, but much more sun and far less rain!

Hi Soizic, I presume from your profile pic that you play the violin, yes?

Mmm, yes, but I did write (twice!) "whatever that means" - I think it doesn't necessarily mean bodhráns and fiddles.

The rich kids in the arts are valuable too because they demand what they need

I suppose it's whatever you want it to be. That's the beauty of music. Bax, fired up by his imagination, was probably seeing ancient Celtic heroes atop spray-speckled cliffs. Regarding the music itself, you're right, it isn't of the Celtic tradition. But I suppose a couple of fiddles and a bodhran wouldn't have captured the epic vision Bax had in mind :-)

i recomend the dream of olwyn….from a film made in 47….it wasfilmed at trabarwith strand….not far away…..again a beeeeeeaaaaautiful piece….i cant remember the name if the film….something like let me live….something like that….hope you find it :-)

not originaly…im from hampstead in london….the family moved to tintagel in '81….a week before charles and dianna married….since leaving school ive lived all over the place….but i seem to always come back here

What's the painting at the end?

n.b. Enthuiasm of the notes here notwithstanding, "Bax" is an Anglo-Saxon name, not a Celtic one.

To Scottie

@1970SWP Och aye! Not to stray from the music, laddie, but me grand was a Scot Catholic frae the Heelands, Glaswegian by birth but you'd never get him to admit to it (bit of a snob), though in his cups and wi' a skinful of Loch Dhub he'd frequently break into "I belong tae Glasgee, dear ol' Glasgee toon!" Yeah, I prefer the RSNO recorded by Chandos but I like their Naxos stuff too--and the price. I'll take the Beeb in a pinch. Scots wa hae!

This is not that far off from being the greatest piece of music ever written- if only the drab middle sections were as good as the opening and ending!

I can clearly see how John Williams totally plagiarized...uh, was inspired by... Tintagel.

knock out

totaly….

Except, of course, that there's nothing "Celtic" (whatever that means) about this music, which is essentially Franco/Germanic (whatever that means)...

too slow

The brass are out of tune - particularly trumpets and trombones - not the best from a reputable orchestra.