Bax's Second Symphony strikes me as an even stronger work than its predecessor, and certainly a more satisfying constructed one. Its first movement is again closer to rondo than to sonata form, tense and purposeful fast music (often dark or with martial undertones) alternating with more lyrical and gracious ideas, but there is more of a feeling of development here. The 'second subject' is quite fully discussed at its first appearance, becoming in turn both opulently rhapsodic and raptly ethereal, but its recurrence is briefer and its mood by now movingly poignant, as though it knew from experience what is to become of it (Bax's tunes often become more beautiful as they suffer adversity), and the return of the allegro is all the more abrupt: it was waiting, it had never been away. The slow introduction to this movement, too, is a strongly unifying force, here and throughout the symphony (not least in the finale, where a section of it is quoted note for note).
The slow movement includes one of Bax's noblest melodies, almost Elgarian in its eloquent breadth, but the way its emotional temperature changes in mid-sentence is typical of Bax and no one else.
Quite characteristically he does not state this theme immediately (he allows the listener to believe that a quasi-strophic violin tune is to be the movement's subject; the 'real' melody arrives unheralded), and the development culminates not in its triumph but in a catastrophic demonstration of its instability. It is difficult not to read this movement as a metaphor, for a lofty but illusory ideal (whether that ideal be a private or a public one), and the final appearance of the theme, quiet, exquisitely coloured and embroidered, as an image of relinquishment. The finale is an intensification of this, more convincing than the corresponding movement of the First Symphony partly because the narrow line between aspiration and collapse is so finely drawn (the tread of the music, again march-like, is rather close to a skipping dance-measure at times; the final climax so nearly achieves, against all odds, an optimistic outcome), and partly because Bax does this time leave the last word to an epilogue, a slow decline into the darkness that the symphony's introduction had predicted.
Nympholept (the word means ''possessed by nymphs'') is a much earlier piece, originally sketched for piano and then orchestrated immediately before the composition of The Garden of Fand; this is its first recording. It shares with Fand a rich and fantastic orchestral imagination (present also in the symphony, but there combined with some of the rock and ice of Bax's later manner); it is woodland nature music with interludes of Dreaming quiet and heavy passion: English Scriabin of the most luscious kind, and a welcome addition to the Bax discography.
Bryden Thomson's performances are predictably splendid, and the recorded sound matches both his care for balance and precision of colour and the luxuriance of the orchestral playing. Myer Fredman's account of the symphony on Lyrita is also very fine, with a real urgency to it and an admirable tautness of control throughout. He has a tendency to hurry in the slow movement, though, and his transitions between moods are sometimes a bit more abrupt than Thomson's (not necessarily a bad thing in this music). The Lyrita recording is excellent, but the newcomer has a broader dynamic range (Bax's use of the organ to underpin climaxes is formidably rendered) and it has the 18-minute bonus of Nympholept as well, of course.'