When the emininent British conductor Adrian Boult was a guest on the BBC's famous classical music program Desert Island Discs (the format of a show was to have a prominent figure name, and justify by example and discussion) his choice of just ten recordings to take if he were to be exiled to a desert island for life. Boult chose this symphony as one of his ten. It couldn't be simply that Boult had premiered the work (December 16, 1938) and was its dedicatee, for there are numerous compositions with that distinction. It is most likely the qualities of outstandingly clear orchestra, remarkably logical grown of its musical ideas, and its warm, lyrical feeling.

Shortly before he revised the symphony, Rubbra gave a talk explaining that his impulse in writing the symphony was to see if he could make a large symphonic structure out of the interplay of individual melodic lines; in short, out of polyphony without any parts being relegated to mere "accompaniment." All the music is derived from an initial string line, a simply descending scale, which is mirrored by a rising scale on horns.

This generates an impressive thirty-five minute symphony in four movements. The first movement, from its opening gesture, moves in a broad, seamless flow to a climax. This slow movement moves without pause into a very fast scherzo with some of the bumptious rhythms of a Holst scherzo, the accents often falling off the beat. There is a pause before the third movement, which is again slow. Rubbra creates a sense of orchestral space by often putting the music in the upper and lower registers, with the middle parts vacant. The finale is a rondo in irregular and compound meters, a dance that one can't dance to. Now the ascending counter-scale takes on important, and the tendency of the music of this movement to rise adds optimism to its expression. It ends in a clear D Major

© Joseph Stevenson, All Music Guide