William Walton's Second Symphony was premiered in 1960 by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic. The work's initial reception was lukewarm. Having long established a compositional style that avoided the technical trends of high modernism, his tonally-grounded music was dismissed by more academically-minded audiences; at the same time, more casual listeners failed to penetrate the friendly surface of his music to find its subtle nuances and innovations, and several critics complained that the Second Symphony offered nothing new. The renewed interest in tonality (and/or reaction against atonality) at the end of the twentieth century, however, resulted in a reassessment of Walton's musical language and a reengagement with nearly forgotten works like the Symphony No. 2. This trend has facilitated the sort of reaction promised by one of a handful of this work's early fans. "The Second Symphony," wrote a critic speaking for the minority, "is curiously reluctant to yield its secrets and inner meanings through a few hearings. Not that it is difficult music, but it does need concentrated and frequent listening before the veil parts and one is admitted to the inner circle of its highly distinctive sound-world."

The work is scored for substantial orchestral forces, will full strings and brass, triple winds, two harps, piano, and a large percussion battery. Its three movements, lasting a combined half-hour, assume fairly standard structures. The first movement (marked Allegro molto) follows an audible sonata form with the expected first and second theme areas, transitions, developments, and modulations, though it reverses the recapitulation so that it mirrors, rather than repeats, the theme areas of the exposition. The opening motive, comprised most predominantly of a tense half step followed by a stark leap of a sharp seventh, establishes the tense and mysterious mood of the movement, which undoubtedly owes some of its orchestrational and melodic drama to Walton's film work during the war years. A close listening reveals a high level of motivic unity embedded within the musical special effects, as the initial figure makes a presence in nearly every phrase.

The inner movement, Lento assai, finds Walton alternately at his most evasive and his most lyrical. The arching, rhapsodic melodies in the violins and upper winds are some of his most beautiful, but find themselves challenged at every turn by pensive harmonic shifts and textural effects. Walton demonstrates a masterful management of tension when, in the minutes before the movement's denouement, a dominant pedal underscores a seemingly endless approach to an elusive cadence (a cliché à la Wagner's "Liebestod"); however, as the tension begins to settle, the basses, rather than resolving upwards by leap to the tonic, wind their way slowly and chromatically downward, creating a rather disoriented sense of repose. The finale takes the form of a passacaglia, with a 14-bar theme that is introduced forcefully by the orchestra in unison. The theme (which, interestingly, exhausts all 12 chromatic tones) undergoes several contrasting variations before a scherzando coda draws the work to a close.

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