I believe that Frank
Bridge’s masterpiece is Enter Spring.
Furthermore, I consider it to the finest tone poem in the repertoire of British
music. Fulsome praise indeed!
Despite its
‘Georgian’ title, there is no way that it can be described as a purely pastoral
piece. It is not a cow leaning over a gate. There is a pastoral element, but as
Rob Barnett (MusicWeb International) has said, “tempered with the more
serious stirrings of [Bridge’s] more avant-garde style.”
Although Bridge’s
life centred on London he was able to spend much time in his native county. In
the nineteen twenties Bridge and his wife built a house, Friston Field, near
West Dean in Sussex. It overlooked a large panorama of the downs. Bridge’s
earlier master work, The Sea was inspired by the English Channel. The South
Downs were to provide the backdrop to Enter
Spring. Originally it was to have been called On Friston Down but this name was abandoned. The short-score was composed
between August 1926 and January 1927. The full score is dated 27 May 1927.
It would be easy
to play ‘spot the influence’ with this piece. There are echoes of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring or Arnold Bax’s Spring Fire. Barnett alludes to John
Fould’s great but neglected work April-England.
Ravel and Debussy and even Alban Berg are never far from mind. But Bridge is beholden
to no man; this is a synthesis of all that he had composed up 1927.
Enter Spring was premiered on 21 October 1927 at that year’s
Norwich Triennial Festival. The Queen’s Hall Orchestra was conducted by the
composer.
The critic of the Morning
Post (28 October 1927) was impressed: “[Frank Bridge] ...carried the arms
of a commissioned composition with remarkable success. The work has a fluent
inspiration, meticulous in detail yet seemingly spontaneous, graphic yet not
wholly realistic, complex yet persuasive. The programme is spring as a full experience
rather than a vague prescience, and at every point the finally wrought music conveys
this experience urgently and generously.”
This is not the
place to analyse the details of this work. It is the forum to pile up the adjectives. This work is rich in development,
subtle in its remarkable scoring. There is a superabundance of invention and
imagination here – from the first to the last bar. There is a “formal mastery”
that makes this work a paragon of its type. It is sunny, turbulent, colourful,
exuberant, and melancholic all in the space of twenty minutes. At the end of
the work Spring is truly ushered in. Would that I was on the Sussex Downs at
Chanctonbury or Firle Beacon or West Dean to see it!
Listen to Frank
Bridge’s Enter Spring on YouTube, here. It is played by
the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, conducted by Richard Hickox.
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