Delius was a busy man through 1913. As the year began he was at work on a revision of Fennimore and Gerda, interrupted by trips to Munich in January and London in March, both times to hear performances of A Mass of Life. Championship of his work by Beecham over the previous six years established him in England, while Beecham and his mistress, Lady Cunard, introduced Delius to the cream of English high society. After years of struggle and uncertainty, he was fashionable. A tantalizing cul-de-sac, in a letter of May 27 Delius wrote to Stravinsky—"I am afraid it is quite impossible for me to come to the final rehearsal tomorrow, but I shall certainly come on Thursday as I must insist on hearing your work: only as I haven't a ticket I shall call for you at your hotel and go in with you...." The occasion was the riotous premiere of Le Sacre du printemps—Delius' opinion of the work is not extant. Stravinsky left this reminiscence—"I met Frederick Delius. He had come to Covent Garden to attend a performance of our Ballet. Beecham introduced him to me, and he paid me compliments for Petroushka, but, as I spoke almost no English, and he but little French, the conversation did not develop. Thirty-seven years later, I visited his famous orange farm, D.H. Lawrence's would-have-been Utopia in Florida." There is no other mention of Delius and Stravinsky crossing paths. Delius had been approached by Phillip Heseltine to allow Lawrence to establish a commune at Solano Grove, a gambit of which nothing came. To Heseltine, on June 28 Delius wrote from Grez, "...I could not come to England as I was hard at work on something new & did not want to break off." Almost certainly this was North Country Sketches, for the score of which Beecham asked Delius in June of the following year, on the eve of the First World War. Completed between the Two Pieces for Orchestra (On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring and Summer Night on the River) and the gracious, charming Air and Dance, the first two movements, "Autumn" and "Winter Landscape," are surprisingly bleak, melding piquancy, and desolation in evocations of the moors surrounding Delius' Yorkshire birthplace. "Dance," the noisy third movement, protests too much, though the final "March of Spring" engagingly teeters between exuberance and ecstasy. Beecham premiered the set with the London Symphony Orchestra at Queen's Hall on May 10, 1915.

© Adrian Corleonis, All Music Guide