Program Notes: Morlot Conducts The Sounds of Spring

FRANK BRIDGE 
Enter Spring 
BORN: 1879, Brighton, England 
DIED: 1941, Eastbourne, England 
WORK COMPOSED: 1927 
WORLD PREMIERE: October 1927, Norwich Triennial Festival, with the composer conducting. 

Mention the subject of English classical music and a flurry of names comes to mind: Thomas Tallis, Henry Purcell, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Edward Elgar, Gustav Holst, William Walton, Benjamin Britten…. While he may be a footnote to some, Frank Bridge belongs among them. His restless musical mind and modernistic path gave commanding weight to many of his 200-odd works and belie his neglect in the concert hall. 

If you have never listened to Bridge, a good place to start is Enter Spring, composed in 1927 as a tone poem, which is freer flowing than a formal symphony. Inspired by the English countryside and the gradual thaw of winter, the 20-minute piece was originally titled On Friston Down to reflect the idyllic setting of the composer’s home in the postcard Sussex village of Friston, not far from the English Channel. The music made an impression on a 13-year-old Britten — who would become the composer’s most famous student — calling it “a riot of color and harmony.’’ He later made a notable live recording at the 1967 Aldeburgh Festival.  

Enter Spring could have been cast as a landscape painting in sound, but Bridge chose to keep his distance from late-Romanticism by embracing the edgier post-Romantic movement. The piece moves along a path of shifting tempos, its rhythms piercing and prickly and capped by potent climaxes. Bridge hints at the chromaticism of the Second Viennese School, bathes us in the lushness of Ravel, mimics birdsong and concludes our journey with the peal of bells against a swelling orchestral wash. Some call it the finest tone poem in the British repertoire. 

“Enter Spring has a main allegro of brilliant urgency and a hypnotically lovely pastoral episode,” notes the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. “It displays mercurial changes of direction in a search for a definitive statement.” 

SAMUEL ADAMS 
No Such Spring (Piano Concerto) 
BORN: December 30, 1985 
WORK COMPOSED: 2022 
WORLD PREMIERE: February 23, 2023, with the San Francisco Symphony, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen and featuring Conor Hanick as soloist. 

Samuel Adams could have ridden the coattails of his famous father, the American composer John Adams, but he carved out a distinctive voice that eludes labels or categories. After studying double bass and composition at Stanford and Yale, he rose through the music world with commissions and appointments, notably as composer-in-residence for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Concertgebouw of Amsterdam.  

Such forums allowed him to experiment and test the results in performance; Drift and Providence, Violin Diptych and Tension Studies are now part of the modern repertoire. His 30 orchestral, chamber, vocal and multimedia pieces form an eclectic melting pot of classical forms, arbitrary noise, jazz improvisations, electro-acoustic explorations and music recorded in nature.  

“Adams is among the most interesting composers of the millennial generation in his negotiation of the tensions that shape and define his musical narratives,” notes Gramophone magazine. “He moves between directness and implication, silence and resonance, emotion and its aftermath.” 

When the COVID-19 pandemic etched its way across the country, Adams began to reimagine his approach to his next work. Should he write music reflecting this bleak and tragic time, or emphasize hope? He chose a positive path, describing in sound the return to normal life after a rigid hibernation — like flowers emerging from a long freeze. 

“I’ve always been fascinated by the way spring is made audible in music,” he said on a YouTube video. “Think of Copland, Schumann and Vivaldi. But for every Vivaldi there’s a Stravinsky because there can be violence in the act of renewal. This really resonated with me, thinking about what spring in America would be like after two years of silence. So, the piece explores the beauty — and pain — of renewal.”  

The result was No Such Spring, a piano concerto commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony and cast in three conventional movements. “My intention was to create a virtuosic symphonic work with the piano acting as the orchestra’s inner voice,” he said. 

The first movement, Colorfugue, introduces what the composer calls “the granular material” of the whole piece, a dense, rippling tapestry of orchestral colors. The pianist plays a simple theme one finger at a time as strings, woodwinds and brass emerge in layers, hinting of the minimalist technique of his father.  

Then chaos ensues. Orchestra and piano quarrel with tense and dissonant chords, and Adams evokes the cracking of the ice on Walden Pond through a moment from Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. This leads without pause into the second movement, Double Variations, which the composer describes as “an ecstatic tipping point whereupon the orchestra swallows itself whole.”  

In the final movement, Garden of Wire and Wood, the orchestra rallies around the piano, and we hear a quote from Olivier Messiaen’s Turangalîla Symphony. All this is magnified by rich and thorny textures from a menagerie of percussion instruments that include marimba, sizzle cymbal, tubular bells, washboard, whip, xylophone and güiro.  

ROBERT SCHUMANN 
Symphony No. 1 in B-flat major, Op. 38, “Spring” 
BORN: 1810, Zwickau, Germany 
DIED: 1856, Endenich (Bonn), Germany 
WORK COMPOSED: 1841 
WORLD PREMIERE: March 31, 1841, in Leipzig, Germany, at the Gewandhaus under the baton of Felix Mendelssohn. 

Robert Schumann was a visionary who helped define musical Romanticism by, in his own words, sending “light into the depths of the human heart.” A superb pianist, literary critic and advocate for such up-and-coming talents as Brahms and Chopin, Schumann led a versatile life, and his marriage to Clara Wieck stands as one of the more poignant love affairs in the world of art. 

As we look at Schumann’s career, his compositions often appear as complementary chapters, following his habit of writing in a single medium at a time: chamber music one year, symphonies the next, and entire seasons devoted to songs or church music. In 1842 alone, he wrote three string quartets, a piano trio and the magnificent Quintet for Piano and Strings, essentially inventing a new musical medium.  

Although his chamber and solo piano works often overshadow his four symphonies, the latter are historically important in bridging the gap between Beethoven and the mid-19th century narrative in music. Their use of cyclical form (particularly Schumann’s Fourth) and strong poetic imagery complement an introspection that echoes the composer’s battle with mental illness. 

Schumann wrote the initial sketches of the First Symphony in less than a week in January 1841, followed by the orchestral clothing in February and revisions after its premiere on March 31. This would be a pattern: white heat inspiration at the start, then textural elaborations and final revisions after a first hearing.  

Literary models influenced much of his music. In the case of the First Symphony, it was Frühlingsgedicht (Spring Poem) by the German poet Adolf Böttger. The composer said that “I would like the music to suggest the world turning green, perhaps with a butterfly hovering in the air, and then to show how everything to do with spring is coming alive.”  

Schumann assigned each of the four movements a moniker: The Beginning of Spring, Evening, Merry Playmates and Spring in Full Bloom, respectively. But he soon rejected these descriptions, preferring the music to speak in the abstract. 

The “Spring” is the freshest sounding of his four symphonies and exudes the joy he felt from his recent marriage to Clara. This radiance appears from the start with a brass fanfare, an anchor throughout the work (it returns in the finale) driven forward with inexhaustible rhythmic energy. For the historically curious, it also marks the first time three sets of timpani appear in a symphony. 

The lovely Larghetto — a cantabile for orchestra — is a musical portrait of Clara and leads without pause into the Scherzo: Molto vivace. This movement is unique in offering not one but two contrasting trios. In the finale, Schumann borrows a tune from a favorite work of his own, his masterpiece Kreisleriana, connecting the worlds of piano and symphonic music. It ends in a thrilling coda and the sparkling sound of the triangle. 

English composer and conductor Julius Harrison said this and Schumann’s other symphonies contain “touches of genius enshrined in beauty, dramatic moments to stir our emotional reflexes, as well as melodic and harmonic surprises.” 

All notes by Kurt Loft © 2026

Kurt Loft is a journalist and music critic who has written for various publications and arts groups for 45 years. A member of the Music Critics Association of North America, he lives in St. Petersburg, Florida.