Edmund Rubbra reviews

Sir Adrian Boult was the dedicatee of Edmund Rubbra’s Second Symphony; he conducted its premiere in 1938, and included it many years later in his choice on BBC Radio’s Desert Island Discs. Such a deep personal connection shines through every bar of this 1954 studio recording, whose near- incandescent intensity makes the strongest possible case for Rubbra’s powerfully felt and sustained, but riskily monochrome idiom, with its dominant emphasis on linear flow.