The perspective afforded by time has shown just how cohesive and coherent a cycle Malcolm Arnold's nine numbered symphonies are, though that sense of follow-through could not have been apparent to even the composer's most devoted listeners when they were first performed. This is especially true of the last four symphonies, which seem almost quixotic in mood and emotional contrast.

After the oblique and unsettling fusion between classical and jazz elements in the Sixth Symphony, Arnold took until 1973 to complete the Seventh Symphony. Largely written at Sir William Walton's home on the Italian island of Ischia, the work was first performed in London in May the following year. The dedication, "To Katherine, Robert and Edward" – Arnold's children, would hardly merit comment were it not for the character of the score, which has the most extreme emotional aura of any of his works. Whether or not the dedication conceals a deeper personal intent is something on which to ponder.

Lacerating strings and pounding brass set the unremitting tone of the first movement, the opening idea more a diverse sequence of motifs, than a theme as such. A plangent melody introduced by lower strings, passing to woodwind and solo horn, provides only marginal respite. The opening music returns briefly, before the second theme receives more sustained and inward treatment. The central development proceeds ominously, no less intense for its restrained dynamic level. At length, a bizarre ragtime march comes to the fore, sparking off a full reprise, in which the earlier unison chords on brass and tam-tam punctuate the stridency at key moments. The emotional climax is reached with the heartfelt return of the string theme, movingly pointing up the human vulnerability behind the militaristic aggression. Inevitably, the latter returns to bring the movement full-circle; three brutal strokes on a cow-bell adding to the grim finality.

The second movement is among Arnold's most searching orchestral conceptions. Musing woodwind introduce a valedictory trombone theme, recalling Shostakovich in its angular plaintiveness (the latter's Fifteenth Symphony, completed only two years before Arnold’s work, has such a theme in its slow movement). The response of the strings, muted and austere, is pared down to motivic and harmonic essentials, opening-out expressively only when it takes up the woodwind material. Two trumpets sound hauntingly over the landscape, and an ominous motion on tom-toms begins to develop; at first unobtrusively, then gaining steadily in prominence as the music feels its way uncertainly. The trombone theme is passed between solo brass and strings, before the tom-toms launch the massive climax: a piercing succession of discords, three cow-bell strokes, and the woodwind theme declaimed in impassioned tones and in rhythmic unison by the whole orchestra. Finally, a bassoon soliloquy leads the music down into the depths of the lower strings.

The finale returns in part to the mood of the opening movement. A purposefully-striding theme on strings and woodwind, offset by sardonic interjections from brass, is succeeded by a more pensive idea on flute and oboe, then lower strings and trumpet. The music gradually retreats almost beyond earshot, before Celtic traditional music suddenly strikes up - at first discreetly on harp and woodwind, then brazenly in a graphic evocation of an Irish folk-band. The main material returns to steer the movement to a seemingly tragic conclusion, but the return of the cow-bell provokes a wholly unexpected outcome - two massive unison chords and three tonic chords which end the symphony, if not in triumph, at least in a mood of hard-won defiance.