During the summer of 1927 Bax's thoughts turned northward to the Nordic Countries for both musical models and extra-musical imagery. While this tendency is evident in his Northern Ballads, it has little or no presence in the Overture, Elegy, and Rondo, completed by the end of the summer. Its proportions and orchestration look to eighteenth-century Vienna and Mozart, not twentieth-century Finland and Sibelius. The Overture, Elegy, and Rondo was first performed on a Proms concert of October 3, 1929, by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Henry Wood. Murdoch printed the full score in 1938 with a dedication to conductor Eugene Goossens.

The clarity Bax achieves in the Overture, Elegy, and Rondo belies its large orchestral forces, which include three flutes with piccolo, two oboes with English horn, two clarinets with bass clarinet, two bassoons with contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, harp, percussion (requiring three players), and strings. All three movements of the Overture, Elegy, and Rondo are infected with a youthful energy that appears in Bax's other works of the time, especially the Overture to a Picaresque Comedy and the Northern Ballads.

In material, organization, and orchestration, the overture is written in a manner that could be described as neo-classical. The composer himself referred to the opening theme as "suggestive of an eighteenth-century concerto," no doubt referring to its shape and tendency toward periodicity. The secondary theme is of the same ilk, without the contrast that marks many other of Bax's second themes. This may be because the movement is in ternary, not sonata form. The central section is not developmental, but presents new, lyrical material, with its primary, sustained melody in the horns. After some buildup of tension, the opening material returns to close the movement.

A dense orchestral wash of sound begins the elegy in an atmosphere Bax once described as "spectral." Low brass sound the first real theme of the movement and lead to a climax. At the center is a lullaby-like tune drastically different from the first theme, which returns in an altered form to end the movement. In comparison to Bax's earlier works, the harmony and orchestration here are streamlined, even stark, and the musical argument is highly concentrated.

Classical-era style and procedures appear again in the rondo, which opens with a lively tune for the horns. When this tune returns between episodes it is, in a Baxian way, transformed, but only to a minimal degree—it is always easy to identify. Both its brevity and concision seem to be nods to an earlier era.

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