An ideal introduction to the music of Frank Bridge, this much-loved programme was always one of the highlights of Sir Charles Groves’s Liverpool tenure, and its reappearance is more than welcome. Since Groves and the RLPO set down these big-hearted renderings in July 1975, a handful of individual performances – most notably Vernon Handley and the Ulster Orchestra in a stunningly engineered account of The Sea – may have surpassed them in terms of poetic rapture and beguiling finish, yet Groves’s clear-headed, stirringly sympathetic Enter Spring, though at times a little too sturdy on its pins, easily outranks the recent Marriner. Incidentally, there’s another Enter Spring with Groves, a live account with the BBC SO from the 1978 Proms, a good deal more propulsive than its predecessor (18'24'' as against 21'22''), but, alas, often disconcertingly less tidy too (astonishingly, the trombones’ unforgettable fortissimo descending flourish at the height of the central climax is nowhere to be heard!).
The transfer is the same as that used for an earlier mid-price EMI Studio offering (7/89 – nla), and the finished article sounds as resplendent and full-bodied as ever (if, perhaps, with a touch less background hiss than before). Don’t miss this reissue.'