"Catastrophic and oppressive" is how the composer describes this symphony. Building on the lessons in technique Bax had learned in its predecessor, the Second Symphony is a work of power and unresolved conflict that is more formed, in a structural sense, than the First. The four major motifs dominating the whole work's development appear within the first sixty bars before unfolding through a dynamically rich score.

Written mainly in Geneva (where Harriet Cohen had gone for her health) in the winter of 1924-25, the symphony is dedicated to Serge Koussevitsky, who premièred it in Boston in December 1929. It has a vaguely bitonal opening, an austere but beautiful central movement and a powerful closing section, marked Allegro feroce, in which the composer demands the horns be "...coarsely blown." In a literal sense as well as the figurative, it is a necessary 'work in progress' en route to the Third Symphony. The closing bars, while losing something of the tension that pervades the rest of the work, fade away to a point at which the Third Symphony must (and does) logically begin.

Scored for the largest orchestra ever demanded by the composer, including two tubas, piano, organ, celesta and a large array of percussion instruments, the Second Symphony shows influences of Sibelius (in the 'Big Tune' of the second movement), of Strauss (in the deft touches of orchestration between development sections) and of Nielsen in its progressive tonality.

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