Rubbra's eleven symphonies from five decades represent a major journey in three distinct stages. The first four, composed before and just after the out-break of the Second World War, and in some ways reflecting that time, made a truly striking start. There followed a period of fulfilment and highest-level achievement between 1947 and 1971, with four more, each one absolutely characteristic and fairly describable as a masterpiece. The choral Ninth Symphony (Sinfonia Sacra) was a one-off which meant a lot to him; it ushered in a final period in which his last two symphonies had a new conciseness.

Rubbra is not the easiest composer to classify. He sounds unmistakably midtwentieth-century English, but with little trace of the highly chromatic, sensuous, harmonically ingenious sounds developed by post-Delius figures like John Ireland and Eugene Goossens. They were roundly deprecated by more austere colleagues, especially Vaughan Williams and Rubbra's teacher Holst (whose passion was for ‘picking his music to the bare bones’). Nor does he have much if anything of the pastoral strain found in music of the inter-war years which even its devotees, turning round an expression originally meant to wound, now affectionately call ‘cow-pat’. Such works reacted against both the trauma of 1914–18 and a ‘modernism’ aspiring to reflect the post-war world; Rubbra's mature output stands just far enough on from that clash of ways to show up as entirely new and original, though by temperament he was closer to the RVW–Holst arc.