One of the pleasures of the album
English Spring is the fact that it skips the overplayed standards like Delius' On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring and offers relatively obscure but very appealing repertoire. All of it, though, should perfectly fit the expectations of someone attracted by the album's title: it features lush harmonies, colorful orchestrations, and is evocative of nature in the best English Pastoral tradition. Although Arnold Bax doesn't include Spring Fire (1913) among his numbered symphonies, the five-movement piece is symphonic in scope and, to some extent, in structure. Its first movement, "In the Forest before Dawn," sounds like a mirror of
Schoenberg's depiction of the forest at dusk at the beginning of Gurrelieder; the woodwind figures that open the two works are so spookily similar that it's hard to believe the composers hadn't compared notes. It's a gratifyingly lyrical, glowingly orchestrated, atmospheric work whose unfolding is mostly languidly unhurried until its extroverted final movement.
Delius' Idylle de printemps (1889) is an altogether more soaringly rhapsodic work that in some of its quieter moments might be described as bearing the imprint of
Debussy's Nocturnes, except that the two pieces were being written at exactly the same time. Delius' "The March of Spring" from North Country Sketches (1914), the most frequently recorded piece on the album but still something of a rarity, sounds more like an idyll than a march and has the composer's characteristic orchestral delicacy and vividness. Frank Bridge's Enter Spring is of a more modern cast, closer to
Walton than to any of the other composers represented. It's an exuberant celebration of the exhilaration that comes from the certainty that winter is past, full of rhythmic and melodic vitality.
Mark Elder leads the Hallé Orchestra in radiant, impassioned performances that convincingly give voice to the joy and energy of the season. The sound of the recordings, some made live and some in the studio, is clean, warm, and expansive.