Bax Symphony No. 4 – Lloyd-Jones

Bax has always suffered from being liked for the wrong reasons — the Celtic mists, the “Tintagel” sunsets, the perfumed orchestration that made Constant Lambert sniff about music that “smells good.” The symphonies tell a different story, and none more emphatically than the Fourth, which is not a tone poem stretched to forty minutes but a genuinely combative piece of symphonic thinking dressed in ravishing clothes. That distinction matters. It is exactly what David Lloyd-Jones and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra understand.

I have lived with Bryden Thomson’s Chandos album for the better part of two decades — the one with the Ulster Orchestra, opulently engineered, the strings given that plush, slightly recessed glow Chandos favored in the 1980s. It is a lovely record. It is also a record more interested in atmosphere than argument, and hearing Lloyd-Jones straight afterward is like wiping condensation off a window. Everything is still there. You can just see it better.

The playing has bite. Ensemble in the outer movements is crisp without turning brittle, and there’s an unforced sense of forward motion — Bax’s sequential harmonic writing, which can sprawl in lesser hands, here articulates like sentences with punctuation. Lloyd-Jones treats the tempo markings as instructions rather than suggestions. Nothing wallows.

The slow movement is the test, always has been with Bax. He wrote his symphonies in that unusual three-movement span he inherited partly from Sibelius’s example and partly from his own impatience with textbook four-movement schemes, and it’s the Lento moderato that carries the emotional freight of all that compression. Here the RSNO strings produce a tone that’s cooler than Ulster’s, less vibrato-drenched, and the effect, paradoxically, is more moving. You hear the bass drum’s entrances — Naxos’s engineers deserve real credit here — as something closer to a heartbeat than a special effect, arriving from near-silence with a physical weight that never tips into bombast. Dynamics stay restrained through most of the movement. The tension is in what’s withheld.

Then the finale simply goes for it. Bax marks it Allegro, and Lloyd-Jones takes him at his word. The six horns — this is a score that demands them, along with the organ that has kept promoters nervous and the work off programs for the better part of a century — open up in the closing pages with a blaze that feels earned rather than applied. The symphonic argument, such as it is, resolves with a kind of triumphant exhaustion. Fine writing, finely judged.

The two fillers are well chosen, not padding. Overture to a Picaresque Comedy, from the same year as the symphony, is Bax in his puckish mode: quick, tuneful, over before it overstays its welcome, a genuine curtain-raiser rather than a contractual obligation. Nympholept is the more interesting discovery. Composed before 1914 as a piano miniature and orchestrated decades later, it shows us the young Bax of the Yeats-haunted, faun-obsessed imagination, before the symphonies disciplined that impulse into something sturdier. Bax died without hearing the orchestral version played. One wonders what he’d have made of the RSNO’s account — the string tone here has an almost indecent richness, harp glissandi shimmering under woodwind solos that breathe with real rubato. It’s a small indulgence, and rightly placed at the end of the disc rather than the start.

Naxos’s engineering throughout is admirably unfussy: detailed without being analytical to the point of coldness, with enough hall ambience to let the organ register properly in the Fourth without swamping everything else. Given the price point, this issue is close to unanswerable. Collectors with Thomson already on the shelf need not feel obligated to discard it. It remains a reading of real sympathy. But anyone starting fresh with Bax, or wanting the finest available version of what may be his single greatest symphonic achievement, should look here first. Very warmly recommended.