Symphony No.1 (1986)

Rouse: Symphony No.1. The First Symphony is a sombre and introspective score, in which Rouse is preoccupied with the nineteenth-century concept of heroism, and the dismantling of this idea in the twentieth century. A reference to this programme is found in the principal motif of the symphony, derived from the opening of the adagio of Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony, and played - as in the Bruckner original - by a quartet of Wagner tubas.
Classics Today 10/10.