Lyrita now follow their pioneering recordings of the Third and Fourth Symphonies (11/90) by reissuing the Sixth and Eighth, adding for good measure the Soliloquy for cello, two horns and strings, previously coupled with the Seventh, as a makeweight. The Sixth Symphony comes from the early 1950s, when Rubbra enjoyed something of a vogue. All four movements derive their material in one way or another from the four notes—E, F, A and B—heard on the cor anglais at the beginning of the finale. When he began work on it, he had intended the finale as the first movement and it wasn't until he was well into the work that he realized its true place in the overall scheme. The first is a sonata design in which the whole argument is borne along by a strong sense of linear continuity: the burden of the melodic line remains virtually unbroken. But the emotional and spiritual centre of gravity is the Canto, a wonderfully serene movement and to my mind one of the most beautiful he ever wrote. The music grows out of the open fifth—the A and E of the motto—and it has something of the purity and tranquillity of spirit of the Missa in honorem Sancti Dominici, written five years earlier.
By the time of the Eighth Symphony (1968), Rubbra was definitely out in the cold. The early 1960s had seen a change in the musical climate: William Glock was in power in the BBC and his musical sympathies lay elsewhere. No one hurried to mount a broadcast and this, I know, puzzled and pained him. The honour (and credit) eventually went to the late Sir Charles Groves, whose premiere performance has incidentally just appeared on CD. No one listening to his devotional music (or, for that matter, the slow movement of the Sixth Symphony) could doubt the depth of Rubbra's religious feeling. The Eighth Symphony pays homage to the Catholic theorist and philosopher, Teilhard de Chardin, and has something of the same mystical intensity of the Sinfonia sacra, the most visionary of all his works. The key centres of all three movements have their origins in the widely-spaced chord heard at the very beginning. Each of them takes as its starting point an interval generated by the opening chord. The intervals on which the three movements are based get progressively smaller. At the time Rubbra wrote of the ''intensity generated by the progressive contraction of intervals as comparable to the energy engendered by the astronomical phenomenon of star contraction''. Certainly the atmosphere it generates has an other-worldly Holstian feel to it.
A day or so after this CD came through the letter-box, I chanced on the same two symphonies, coupled together on the Intaglio label ((CD) INCD7311), the Sixth in a 1971 account by the RPO under Sir Adrian Boult and the Liverpool premiere of the Eighth. Collectors with a special interest in the repertoire will doubtless be attracted as I was—even at full price—but it must, of course, be said that neither begins to compete with the Lyrita on either artistic or technical grounds. Moreover this has de Saram's fervent account of another fine Rubbra score, the Soliloquy he wrote for William Pleeth (the cellist of the Rubbra-Gruenberg-Pleeth Trio). All three works sounded excellent on LP and an A/B comparison of the two formats is very much to the advantage of the CD. An important reissue and strongly recommended.'