Frank Bridge: Enter Spring (1927)

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.