We recommend some of the lesser known compositions, like Schumann’s Symphony no. 1 titled Spring. This work was sketched in just four days and bursts with youthful energy. Johann Strauss II Frühlingsstimmen is a waltz full of the joys of Spring, the bubbling second section imitating birdsong. The music of Swiss-German composer Joachim Raff doesn’t get performed much today, which is a great shame. He composed eleven symphonies, the final four being depictions of the different seasons, number 8 to spring. Frank Bridge is best known as Benjamin Britten’s teacher, but his symphonic poems are also beautifully vocative. Enter Spring is subtitled a rhapsody and was partly inspired by his walks on the Sussex Downs. Arnold Bax’s Spring Fire is far from an English pastoral idyll. It takes its inspiration from Swinburne’s pagan poem Atalanta in Calydon and is full of nymphs, fauns and satyrs, a luscious and lusty romp.