condition (record/cover): NM / EX- 

The central document of Edmund Rubbra's achievement as a symphonist - and a Lyrita recording of a quality that does full justice to music that has remained, despite periodic revivals, less widely known than it deserves. Rubbra (1901-1986) composed eleven symphonies over a period of more than forty years, working in deliberate distance from the modernist mainstream that surrounded him, maintaining a language rooted in modal counterpoint and long-breathed melodic development that traced a direct line from the Elizabethan polyphonists through Holst and Vaughan Williams to his own practice.

The Seventh Symphony in C (1957) is among his most concentrated and formally assured works: a large-scale argument conducted with the kind of unhurried logic that becomes compelling only when the argument is genuinely worth following. The Soliloquy for Cello and Orchestra Op. 57 - with Rohan de Saram as soloist - provides the intimate counterpart, a work in which Rubbra's gift for lyrical line finds perhaps its most direct expression. The Lyrita label, founded to record British music that the major companies ignored, remains the essential source for Rubbra's orchestral output. Lyrita, SRCS 119.