Bax's Sixth Symphony is a difficult piece to bring off; its mood is ambiguous and its form (finale and scherzo conflated, the same material serving both a scherzando function and to provoke catastrophe) can seem more ingenious than organically convincing. Thomson is at least as successful as Del Mar was in his fine LP reading 20-odd years ago (Lyrita SRCS35, 5/67—nla), but the two conductors' approaches are so different that many Baxians will want to have both (or will ungratefully hope for a third to appear which will somehow combine Del Mar's and Thomson's insights).
Thomson's account sounds more beautiful than Del Mar's, for a start, only partly because Chandos's recording is better than Lyrita's (the latter rather fussily focuses on woodwind and brass solo lines, lacks the dynamic range for the outer movements' huge climaxes and robs the strings of bloom in a generally rather airless ambience). There is a clear conflict in the symphony between boldly bleak or savage ideas and more yieldingly gracious ones. Thomson by no means understates the former, but he dwells more on the latter than Del Mar, finding a languishing, Delian quality in the opening of the slow movement, ardour in the second subject group of the first, even a touch of humour amid the fierce drama of the finale. For Del Mar it seems that the shadow and anxiety of the work are never far below the surface: he is reluctant to linger over the first movement's incidental beauties, he has the fraught apex of the second in view even during the soft lyricism of its opening pages and stresses the barbarity rather than the energy of the dance-tune that brings about the finale's climax. For some listeners Thomson may seem to be diluting the work's bitterness and unease, for others Del Mar may appear to overstate them. I find myself in the former group during parts of the first movement where Del Mar communicates more urgency and nervous tension. By contrast I side with Thomson in the finale: not only are the frequent contrasts of mood more marked in his account (always a strong point with him), but he strikes me as more successful—and for many of Bax's admirers this will, I'm sure, seem like heresy—at distinguishing the fact that the vast climax isn't really as shattering as it ought to be. The release of tension after it is finely controlled, the mingling of disquiet and utter calm in the epilogue is expertly judged, and the work ends with a truer sense of achieved finality than in Del Mar's eloquent but more driven reading (but he is not helped at this point by the irritatingly forward placing of the solo horn).
Thomson also has the substantial bonus of the Festival Overture (a first recording of a long neglected early work). More substantial in duration (nearly 16 minutes) and in decibels than in musical quality, perhaps, but there is a good string theme over a characteristically Baxian ostinato in the middle section, and amid the uproar of the noisily scored outer pages two or three whistleable, danceable (clog-danceable, to be precise) tunes can be discerned. I would listen to it before the symphony, if I were you, not after that lovely, ambiguous epilogue.'