Symphonies Nos. 6 & 28 & 29 & 31

Havergal Brians extraordinary late creativity is almost unparalleled in musical history. Between the completion of his Sixth Symphony in 1948 and the end of his compositional life two decades later he wrote a further twenty-six symphonies. No. 6 marks a crucial point in his adoption of more concise forms and economy of expression in its single-movement span, a process taken even further in the brief but free polyphonic fantasia of No. 31. In Symphonies Nos. 28 and 29 Brian turned to the classical four-movement model, if wholly and idiosyncratically re-imagined. The intensity and even savagery of No. 28 is balanced by No. 29, Brians most lyrical late work.