Names that we learn in boyhood keep an aura of sanctity for the rest of our lives.  So while I sat with Arnold Bax in the drawing-room of his mother’s house in Arundel, he at the grand piano and I beside him, drawn up close as though I were to turn the pages of the music score, I saw him as a figure of myth rather than flesh and blood.

His playing strengthened that illusion.  It was massive, a composer’s utilization of the pianoforte, his thumbs translating the deeper strings and woodwind.  But it was also dexterous, for he had studied under Tobias Matthay, the teacher whose expert engineering theories produced the technique of York Bowen, Myra Hess and many other English concert pianists.

Bax filled the drawing-room, the house, the streets of Arundel, with his transcription from the orchestral score of Wagner’s Rheingold, and Debussy’s Pelléas and Mélisande.  The thunderous atmospherics rolled and reverberated from the walls of the Duke of Norfolk’s castle.  ‘You must not wake the baby, Arnold dear,’ said his mother during a pause between his exposition and his increasingly excited argument.