Bax Symphony No 5 in C sharp minor. The Tale the Pine Trees Knew Royal Scottish National Orchestra / David Lloyd-Jones

Naxos (Super budget price) 8 554509 (58 minutes: DDD)

Bax conducting and playing of keen instinct from Lloyd-Jones and the RSNO – on balance, the most impressive instalment yet in this budget-price series

The Fifth is perhaps the most characteristic of Bax’s cycle of seven symphonies, but for all the music’s powerful range of emotion, its seemingly bewildering profusion of material and countless moments of bewitching beauty, the composer’s cannily resourceful symphonic processes are by no means easy to assimilate on first acquaintance (repeated hearings do indeed reveal that all the main ideas have a subtle kinship with the slumbering, unforgettably resonant Poco lento introduction). Nor is it by any means an easy work for performers to negotiate, so it gives me enormous pleasure to report once again that Lloyd-Jones’s intelligent, meticulously observant and purposeful direction pays handsome dividends, and that a well-drilled RSNO in turn responds with sensitivity and enthusiasm. Completed in early 1932, the symphony is dedicated to Sibelius, and in the outer movements especially I’ve never been more aware of the (presumably subconscious?) allusions to the Finnish master’s own Fifth Symphony.

Lloyd-Jones excels in the tightly knit canvas of the opening movement, its epic ambition for once matched by a sense of momentum, architectural grandeur and organic ‘wholeness’ that genuinely compel: not only does he judiciously resist the temptation to dwell too lovingly over Bax’s gorgeously lyrical secondary material, he is also notably successful at bringing out the muscular toughness of the Allegro con fuoco main theme (whose angular rhythm plays such a crucial role in the development).

In the slow movement Lloyd-Jones paints a chillier, more troubled landscape than do either Raymond Leppard (Lyrita, 5/72 – nla) or Bryden Thomson (both of whom conjure the most opulent textures from the LPO). These newcomers are leaner, their approach more affectingly restrained, but they do not miss out on the anguish and slumbering tragedy that courses through this music, and, long before the movement’s close, it’s only too clear that the demons that stalked Bax in the First Symphony’s astonishing central Lento solenne still haven’t been entirely exorcised.

The finale’s main Allegro sets out with gleeful dash and a fine rhythmic snap to its heels. From two bars after fig 27 (4'15"), I’d have preferred to hear more of the muted horns and cor anglais cutting through the texture, but how well Lloyd-Jones judges that tricky, crisis-ridden transition into the epilogue (I hear definite echoes here of the equivalent passage in the last movement of Bax’s Second). Certainly, the apotheosis is a hard-won, grudging victory; those grinding ostinato and acrid woodwinds which launch the Sixth have suddenly never seemed closer.

The 1931 tone-poem The Tale the Pine Trees Knew makes an ideal bedfellow, foreshadowing as it does the bracingly ‘northern’ (to quote the composer) demeanour of the Fifth. Lloyd-Jones’s zestful, attractively wiry reading is fascinatingly different from Thomson’s altogether more darkly evocative (and, it must be said, acutely perceptive) Ulster account. Eyebrows may be raised over Lloyd-Jones’s comparatively extrovert treatment of the work’s exultant final climax, but to my ears it works perfectly convincingly within the context of his conception as a whole. I would not prefer it to the Thomson (still, for me, one of the jewels of the entire Bax discography), but the two performances do complement each other beautifully none the less.

In short, another terrific coupling within what is turning out to be one mightily rewarding enterprise. Plaudits, too, for another eminently truthful, judiciously balanced sound picture from producer/engineer Tim Handley. Roll on the remaining symphonies (Nos 4, 6 and 7) with these same fine artists!