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Edmund Rubbra: Symphonist.

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Edmund Rubbra: Symphonist. By Leo Black. Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2008. [xiii, 242 p. ISBN-13: 9781843833550. $60.] Illustrations, bibliographic references, index, discography.

"Like yards and yards of brown linoleum." This unappealing image was applied to one of the British composer Edmund Rubbra's symphonies by his compatriot, Arthur Bliss. As cold as this judgment may seem, Bliss was hardly alone in his equivocal estimation of Rubbra's symphonic scores. Howard Ferguson wrote to Gerald Finzi, "I was very disappointed by [Rubbra's Third Symphony]--as a work, I mean--at first hearing," Finzi defended Rubbra's symphony privately by writing at the bottom of Ferguson's letter, "Well, he won't after a few more hearings." Finzi, who was often an astute critic of the work of his contemporaries, wrote to a friend that he admired Rubbra's individual profile as a composer, declaring that "from the word go everything he has ever written has been Rubbra" (Stephen Banfield, Gerald Finzi: An English Composer [London: Faber and Faber, 1997], 99).

Surveying the whole of Rubbra's symphonic achievement suggests, however, that Finzi's assessment of his colleague's work may have been overgenerous. In fact, Rubbra took a relatively long time to work through the varied influences that contributed to the formation of his idiom. That Rubbra is relatively little performed today, even in Britain, is hardly the result of a lack of industry, intelligence, or invention; Rubbra composed eleven symphonies, as...

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