David Lloyd­Jones and the RSNO continue their stimulating championship of Bax with this extremely persuasive account of the Fourth Symphony. Largely composed in Morar during the second half of 1930‚ it’s at once the most exuberantly inventive and most sheerly colourful of the cycle (the instrumentation includes six horns and organ). Baxians will always owe a profound debt of gratitude to Bryden Thomson and the Ulster Orchestra (not to mention the Chandos production team) for shedding such revelatory light on what was‚ at the time‚ the least well­known of the symphonies. Lloyd­Jones steers a tauter‚ more athletic course through the eventful first movement than his Gramophone Award­winning rival‚ yet there’s no want of playful affection‚ and the orchestral playing satisfyingly combines polish and eagerness. In the gorgeous central Lento moderato (which‚ like the equivalent movement of the First String Quartet‚ quotes from Bax’s 1918 piano miniature‚ A Romance) Lloyd­Jones perceptively evokes a bracing‚ northerly chill wafting across Bax’s dappled seascape (I love the elemental way the bass­drum subtly darkens the texture at the outset). The unashamedly affirmative finale is a great success‚ its festive pomp and twinkling sense of fun conveyed with personable panache and swagger. If the symphony’s jubilant closing pages reverberate in Thomson’s version with just that crucial bit of extra weight and splendour in Belfast’s Ulster Hall (Chandos’s engineering remains past praise in its stunning realism)‚ Tim Handley’s expert sound and balance do ample justice to Bax’s distinctive scoring and his writing for low woodwind in particular. All told‚ a most enjoyable display. Completed in October 1930 while Bax was composing the Fourth Symphony‚ the Overture to a Picaresque Comedy makes an apt and boisterous curtain­raiser. Lloyd­Jones’s rip­roaring rendering certainly knocks Thomson’s limp LPO version into a cocked hat‚ its propulsive vigour and fiery snap raising echoes of Sir Hamilton Harty’s dashing 1935 world première recording. Nympholept could hardly form a greater contrast: originally written for piano in 1912 and orchestrated three years later‚ it is a ravishing nature­poem in Bax’s most enchanted Celtic vein (and‚ like the roughly contemporaneous Spring Fire‚ never performed in the composer’s lifetime). Again‚ this sensitive‚ clear­headed newcomer is far preferable to Thomson’s curiously laboured conception. Altogether a very welcome release; next up‚ I gather‚ is Bax’s mighty Sixth‚ safely set down by this same team last January.