The 25 minute Seventh (in two movements) is dwarfed by its mighty predecessor. It too rattles cages but the darkling pages are this time alive with distressed echoes of Ravel's La Valse and distorted reflections of Tchaikovsky's Fifth. The work opens in an uncanny image of the start of Bax's Second Symphony premiered in Boston by Koussevitsky during the mid-1920s. Bass accented strings shudder, pregnant with bleak tension. The work plunges and charges along. Relish some thunderously chesty dense string tone at 6.38 in the first movement! The Sixth has its ineffably nostalgic themes and one of equal quality is used in the second movement of the Seventh. It is like a tender memory of childhood - a fragile distortion of Bye Baby Bunting. It is deployed twice and with most effect at 9.09. It is absorbed within a black protesting storm of noise and fades into the ticking of the clock evoked by the harp (a much used instrument in this work). The work ends with a Ravelian snarl and a lump in the throat.

There are alternative versions of the Seventh. The 1976 recording by Leo Ginsburg and the USSR Radio SO is belligerent, tender, urgent and imperious but age is beginning to tell and besides this AAD reissue on a 1980s Olympia (OCD163) is long gone. Still, if you see it in a secondhand bookshop do pick it up. It plays for 23.30 as near as dammit to Svetlanov’s own timing. Halász takes a couple of minutes longer but has the superbly transparent, lucid and powerful acoustic of the Slovak Hall on his side though even that is trounced in terms of clarity by the Svetlanov recording - especially luminous in the Bax-Dvorák woodland idyll of the andante.

Earlier mentions of Bax prompts one passing thought. While we will now never hear Svetlanov conducting a Bax symphony I still cherish hopes that one day Vassili Sinaisky might record Bax's Second and Sixth symphonies with the Russian Federation Academic Symphony Orchestra. They have a grip, potency, sense of the macabre and of the hysterically emotional that is extremely apt to Bax’s wayward imagination.

The Seventh's disc-mate is a work from 1948 in which Miaskovsky replied to 'justified criticism' - the 'encouragement' of the Party's 1946 denunciation of 'formalism'. The Twenty-Sixth Symphony looks back to Balakirev's Overture on Three Russian Themes, to Borodin's In the Steppes of Central Asia to Rimsky's Antar and to the rustic courtliness of the Glazunov symphonies - even to the central movements of his own Eighth Symphony. This is termed a symphony 'on Russian themes' rather along the lines of the Twenty-Third and Prokofiev's Kabardinian string quartet (No. 2). The third movement and its predecessor have a melancholy droop that, in the case of the third, is almost Dowland and is close to Elgar on more than one occasion. It is played with fiery flair. The RFASO's trumpets, horns and brass choir play their uproarious hearts out in a jubilant conclusion with, not for the first time, just a hint of 1812 vulgarity about it.

Rob Barnett