The time seems just ripe for the revival of interest in the Malcolm Arnold symphonies. With the George Lloyd canon already immensely successful on record, Arnold's equally communicative works, by no means simplistic, but entirely free from 'barbed wire', could well appeal to a similar public. One welcomes, too, the return of the Lyrita label to the market place, those familiar with this company's famous LPs of British music, made in the 1960s and 1970s, will not be surprised BA to be told that this CD debut with Arnold's Fourth Symphony offers sound of demonstration quality. It has all the ambient naturalness that made the earlier analogue LPs so impressive, plus the added definition and presence of the new medium, achieved without any loss of beauty in the strings: indeed the LPO violins sound wonder fully radiant.
The performance, under the composer, has the natural ebb and flow and feeling of total spontaneity that makes Lloyd's recordings of his works so much like idealized live performances. But what about the music itself? Well, having previously described Arnold as essentially a miniaturist, I have to say that he sustains the overall span of this ambitious structure remarkably well and the two most impressive movements are the longest, the first and the third, each over 18 minutes in length. The work was commissioned by the BBC and after the broadcast premiere, from the Royal Festival Hall in 1960, Andrew Porter called it ''a symphony for fun... exuberant, melodious, unabashed, likeable''. But for all its popular elements, including the liberal incorporation of Latin American percussion instruments (including bongos and marimba), I found its final impression was of serious purpose. The slow movement, surprised me by somehow recalling the Mahler of the First and Fourth Symphonies though in its atmosphere more than its haunting long-breathed melodic ideas, which are very much Artlold's own. (And the scoring too—there is a marvellously individual colouration in the Andantino at around 11'00'', with the use of the trumpet against a weird background of glissando strings.) The first movement, which opens disarmingly with a flute swirl, and the most deucate string writing, soon produces a real lyrical tune, popular in outline and presented against a syncopated tuba ostinato accompaniment; it is to return at the end and close the movement blissfully after the jagged interruptions of the central episode. The sotto voce scherzo has another catchy syncopated idea, somehow baroque in feeling, and the movement's second half ingeniously runs backwards to the opening bar.
The finale with its opening fugue and later bizarre militarism is not entirely convindng, but resolves itself neatly at the end. Perhaps the work overall does stretch its material to the utmost limits, but there is much one wants to return to and I enjoyed the piece a great deal. May I also praise Lyrita's excellent documentation and the excellent, helpful notes of Hugo Cole.'