‘I put a great deal of time (and emotion) into the writing … it should be very broad indeed, with a kind of oppressive, catastrophic mood.’ Bax’s own description of his Second Symphony (as vouchsafed to Philip Hale and quoted in his notes for the work’s December 1929 world premiere with the Boston SO under dedicatee, Serge Koussevitzky) chimes uncannily with David Lloyd-Jones’s intense conception of this shattering score. From those grinding dissonances at the outset right through to the inconsolable coda, Lloyd-Jones and his Scottish band bring out the unremitting toughness of Bax’s uncompromising, breathtakingly scored vision; even the gorgeous secondary material in the first movement offers just an occasional shaft of pale, wintry sunlight (Bryden Thomson creates textures that are altogether more sensuous, luxurious even). It helps, too, that Lloyd-Jones has clearly thought long and hard about the task in hand. How lucidly, for example, he expounds the arresting introduction, where the symphony’s main building-blocks are laid out before us, and how well he brings out the distinctive tenor of Bax’s highly imaginative writing for low wind and brass. I also like the way he relates the slow movement’s central crisis all the more clearly to the work’s final cataclysm (where the organ is exceptionally well integrated into the sound-picture by producer/engineer, Tim Handley). If the RSNO strings can’t quite command the intoxicating tonal lustre of their LPO counterparts under Thomson or Myer Fredman (whose passionate 1971 Lyrita recording – 6/71 – still awaits CD resuscitation), there’s absolutely nothing slapdash about their response, while the Scottish brass have a field-day (spectacularly clean-limbed trumpets in the finale especially). I have just two small gripes: during the three bars before fig. 25 in the first movement (from 9'21'' to 9'25''), I don’t hear the principal horn’s sublime descending con sordino harmony; and at fig. 5 in the finale (2'14'') there’s what sounds like an errant tenor tuba. Otherwise, I have nothing but admiration for a performance of such thrusting cogency and keen vigour.
Lloyd-Jones proves an equally clear-sighted navigator through the storm-buffeted landscape of November Woods, for many Bax’s greatest tone-poem. Thoroughly refreshing in its enthusiasm and exhilarating sense of orchestral spectacle, this newcomer has a physical impact and emotional involvement that genuinely compel (far more so, in fact, than Marriner’s uncomfortably literal ASMF reading). Though I’m still not convinced by the somewhat jolting gear-change from one bar after fig. L (6'44''), Lloyd-Jones’s remains a purposeful, doughty interpretation, probably the best we’ve had since Boult’s classic 1967 account.
Overall, then, a veritable blockbuster of a coupling, unmissable at the price.'