During 1912–13, Bax wote a set of Four Orchestral Pieces with the titles Pensive Twilight, Dance in the Sun, From the Mountains of Home and The Dance of Wild Irravel. Each movement is scored for different forces, ranging from strings and harp (No. 3) to full orchestra (No. 4). Writing to his friend Arthur Alexander, Bax remarked that the latter ‘will sound like Armageddon—a complete battery of percussion, and castanettes [sic] clucking like a self complacent hen … [;] the gentle and refined melancholy of the first piece [Pensive Twilight] will set it off well.’ The first performance of the Four Orchestral Pieces was given on 20th March 1914 by the Queen’s Hall Orchestra under Geoffrey Toye, and fourteen years later Bax decided to revise them, omitting the last one and retitling the others, while slightly reducing the orchestration and making a few cuts. In this new version, entitled Three Pieces for Small Orchestra, Pensive Twilight was renamed Evening Piece and premièred by an ad hoc orchestra under Malcolm Sargent at a children’s concert in Central Hall, Westminster on 1st December 1928. John Mitchell’s arrangement for piano is of the original version, the manuscript of which is in the British Library (part of Add. MS 50175).
