Bax, London Philharmonic Orchestra, Raymond Leppard - Symphony No 7

Thank you so much for this vinyl upload. The third movement has always been one of my favorite movements in all of the Bax symphonies. So glorious here:)

I think I'm right in saying that this symphony hadn't been performed even as many as a dozen times anywhere when Leppard and Lyrita recorded it. And it's probably had more recordings than public performances since. Elswhere on YouTube we can now hear Boult conducting the New York premiere. It says a lot for Leppard that his LP seems to be the closest yet to that performance. If the BBC has been careful ( and usually it hasn't) a tape from the late 1970s of Leppard conducting Bax's Symphony No 3 with the BBC Northern orchestra might survive somewhere and it should, if it does, certainly be encouraged to find its way onto YouTube, or even on to CD. Listening to this Seventh Symphony these days is rather like trying to decode Rachmaninov by using Schenker, only with better results - Bax is a genuine long-term symphonic thinker who likes to make big early twentieth century climaxes. But even though I spent time when young a couple of roads away from his childhood home on Haverstock Hill, have Irish ancestry,(which he wished he had) and live in the Highlands, I can't even now instinctively feel exactly where he's coming from in his music - I suspect it's not where folk seem to wish it is, though. He's supposed to have said, about his own lack of popularity sometime after the war "They like Sibelius, and when they're tired of him they'll crack up Mahler or Bruckner or some other fellow". He needs (Boult not being available) a conductor like Hamilton Harty, with a lease on the Albert Hall.

what a heartfelt 2nd movement! thanks for the upload :-)

Wunderschöne und überzeugende Aufführung dieser majestätischen und perfekt konstruierten Sinfonie mit farbenreichen Tönen aller Instrumente. Der zweite Satz klingt besonders schön und echt lyrisch. Die einzigartige Konstruktion des letzten Satzes ist auch bemerkenswert. Der unvergleichliche Dirigent leitet das ausgezeichnete Orchester im gut phrasierten Tempo und mit perfekt kontrollierter Dynamik. Einfach wunderbar!