Music and Vinyl: Bax - Spring Fire

"There may currently be no less fashionable music than the hyper-romantic symphonies and orchestral works of Arnold Bax." So starts this plea for a comeback of Bax's music from Tom Service writing in The Guardian ahead of the 2026 Prom Season.

Reviewing a CD reissue of this performance of Spring Fire, Ian Lace writes:

"Of all Bax’s major works, Spring Fire, regarded by the composer ‘as a kind of freely-worked symphony’, seems to have been the most unlucky. Scheduled for performance in 1914, 1916 and 1919, it was never played in his lifetime and remained unperformed until the composer’s death. Spring Fire was influenced by paganism, fashionable at the time, and, in particular, Swinburne’s poem Atalanta in Calydon that had also inspired Bantock to write an extensive choral setting. Bax uses a large orchestra for his vividly imaginative tone painting. The opening movement, ‘In the Forest Before Dawn’, is a beautiful evocation (cool horns, harp, flute and strings) to realise what Bax described as rain-soaked woodlands, "the branches drip softly and a damp delicate fragrance rises from the earth…"; another gloriously scored impressionistic sound picture ‘Daybreak and Sunrise’ follows without a break and the woodlands begin to stir as the denizens awake from their winter sleep. In ‘Full Day’ the fauns, satyrs and half-human shapes cavorting joyfully through sun-speckled glades. This movement and the final ‘Maenads’ when Pan, Bacchus and their retinues rush noisily through the forest are joyful and hedonistic, and Handley fully realises the fiery youthful ardour of the music unleashing a wild, pointed attack. In contrast, his reading of the fourth movement ‘Woodland Love (Romance)’ with its lovely broad melody is hauntingly languid, sensual and fragrant."