STILL. Symphony No. 3. London Sym- phony Orchestra conducted by Sir Eugene Goossens. Saga XID5256

STXID5256 (12 in., 8s. 6d. plus ls. 6d. PT).

Robert Still is one of our less well-known composers; I hope it does not sound too cynical to suggest that this may be because he writes good music. His personal history is that of many potential composers of his generation: a pre-war studentship (Eton, Oxford, RCM), a bit of initial feeling his way in music with teaching and conducting interrupted by the war (searchlights and small orchestras), after the war back to teaching, examining, reviewing; the whole accompanied by the production of a string of works in all fields about which nobody wants to know. 'Nobody' is, mercifully, just not quite strictly true: Windsor once put on an opera, Gordon Clinton once did a few songs, some piano pieces were once actually broadcast (in Germany, of course), and ten years ago Richard Austin conducted a symphony at the Festival Hall. Also ten years ago Argo issued a record of some chamber music, now due for deletion.

It doesn't read like much of a reward for half a lifetime's skilled work. The list is, though, incomplete. For Goossens discovered Still's Third Symphony, and like the proper musician he always was set about recording it: the last recording he made, as it happened, and also believed to be the last music he conducted. And we can now see what this music is really like.

It is strong, it has a forceful impulse, and it is very well scored. It hangs together well as a symphony, independent of any programme, yet it hinges directly on the composer's experiences of life, or of life at various periods in the thirty years prior to 1960. The powerful first movement surges forward, expressing the buoyancy of youth in the 30's; yet it was, avowedly, a buoyancy marred by thoughts of a Europe menaced by Hitler and the Nazis. With the second movement comes an elegiac reflection on the outcome of those pre-war years: compassion for friends killed in the war, and for those living but whose lives were nevertheless broken by others' deaths. In the finale a martial resolution; but the resolution is not one to tyrannize but instead one to resist tyranny, without or within, at whatever cost it may be.

Such programmes (not always, of course, avowed ones) have underlain much music. War, in particular, is a dangerous subject for music as for life: only too easily can the music take on some of the disagreeable features of its inspiration. But Still, perhaps better than Vaughan Williams or Shostakovitch among symphonists, avoids these dangers. If there is a danger it is rather an opposite one: so far from being unduly oppressive it could be thought that the elegiac character of the second movement lacks something in dynamic shape, in sense of climax; the grief ebbs and flows, somewhat as it does in life, rather than shapes itself effectively as it should in art. In the outer movements, too, there is ebb and flow, though of a very different character; here the flow is paramount, the sense of constructive movement strong.

This is indeed a splendid symphony, and it is obviously splendidly played by the LSO, many of whom must have ended by sharing Goossens's belief in the music. The recording I have heard only in stereo which is exceptionally rich and clear in quality. From all points of view this is another of those releases whose value does not begin to be measured by its price. M.M.