Take your time over Bax's Seventh; it can seem two quite different works on two different hearings. Its occasionally noisy manner can make it sound as though Bax is trying to say something simpler than usual, whereas he is as complex and ambiguous as ever, at least in the first two movements. Indeed, you could almost read the first movement as an essay on ambiguity. Identify the 'first subject', for a start. It is in fact a complex of unstable components, what appears confidently purposeful at one moment becoming tense later on, there is a feeling of anxious questing to much of the movement, and even the aspiringly lyrical 'second subject', when it arrives, is assured of no easy triumph. Nor does the movement end with resolution or tranquillity, but in unexpected and shadowed quiet.
The second movement, much criticized in the past, seems to me even finer. A group of wistfully lyrical ideas become darker and graver as they are discussed, but then Bax seems to change the subject: a new bassoon melody is introduced, with rather Irish-sounding fiddle figurations around it. The tension is still present, however, and it mounts to an almost visionary reappearance of one of the original ideas, now eloquent, even grand, but not at all comforting. Again the ending is shadowed: hence my dissatisfaction (so far) with the finale. It has an introduction of considerable pomp and circumstance, which gives way to a set of passacaglia-like variations on a serene and would-be noble theme which for me is just not sufficiently interesting for aspects of it to be presented for ten minutes or so. There is an epilogue, making most poetic use of fragments of the theme ostinato-wise, and the beautiful coda achieves real tranquillity: Bax writing the sea-music that one could have predicted would end his career as a symphonist. But how it is motivated by, or is an adequate response to the rest of that finale, let alone the rest of the symphony, beats me. This is no fault of the performance, which is as responsive to Bax's mercurial transformations as you would expect from Bryden Thomson, and the unassertive clarity of the sound will make further wrestlings with that finale a pleasure.
The four orchestral songs are of varying quality. Glamour, with its strong flavour of Irish folk-music, is a sort of vocal parergon to The Garden of Fand: a ghostly visitant from the fairy world beyond the sea arouses unassuageable longings. Slumber-song is a tenderly lyrical fragment, Eternity a surprisingly effective setting of Herrick to big and brazen orchestral gestures, while A Lyke-wake (the text set by both Britten and Stravinsky) is at least interesting as an example of Bax taking on something rather uncongenial to his talent, one would have thought (the terrors of Whinny-Muir are almost frisky), but making a professionally sustained job of it. Martyn Hill sings them stalwartly and imaginatively.'