The works of British composer Hubert Parry (part of a generation which came to some prominence in England just before Elgar famously burst onto the scene) mostly faded out of favor during the twentieth century before a revival in the later part of that era. When he was remembered, it was almost always for a few of his best choral pieces and this fine set of twenty-four variations on an original theme.

He called it "symphonic" because its one-movement structure (a bit less than fifteen minutes) organizes the variations to correspond with the main divisions of a standard symphonic first movement. Marvelously, this structural approach avoids sounding at all academic. Instead, the music is bright and spontaneous, and has some of the best and most imaginative orchestration of any piece in its generally Brahmsian style. Upon publication of the work, the Variations were taken up in England and abroad, especially in America, where they were championed by conductor Theodore Thomas. Attracted by the sumptuously British feeling of one portion of the music, film composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold even quoted from it in the score to the Errol Flynn action movie The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex in 1939.

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