Bax first worked on his Festival Overture in October 1909. He almost immediately arranged it for two pianos, a version performed first on December 16, 1983, for a BBC broadcast. (One writer has suggested that the two-piano arrangement may be a reduction of the orchestrated version.) Orchestration of the piece commenced in 1911 and was finished expeditiously, in time for a performance on March 27, 1912, in London's Queen's Hall by the National Symphony Orchestra under H. Balfour Gardiner, the piece's dedicatee.

Not satisfied with the piece as it stood, Bax revised the Festival Overture in 1918, slightly altering the orchestration to include three flutes with piccolo, two oboes with English horn, three clarinets with bass clarinet, two bassoons with contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, harp, percussion, and strings. This version received its premiere on February 27, 1919, in Queen's Hall with Adrian Boult conducting. The same concert included the first public performance of Gustav Holst's The Planets.

A raucous piece, the Festival Overture is, according to the composer, in a mood "somewhat akin to that of a Continental carnival. There is no 'realism' in the piece, however, the composer being content to suggest the atmosphere of Bohemian revel in terms of purely absolute music." Throughout the Festival Overture, the orchestra is used much more heavily than in most of Bax's later works. Like Christmas Eve, it is simply too thickly scored.

As do most of Bax's single-movement orchestral pieces, the Festival Overture traces the outlines of sonata form. The themes undergo development shortly after they are first stated, making the exposition the longest part of the piece and the development section superfluous. The recapitulation is cursory. Excess doubling obscures some of Bax's ideas and prevents the clarity we find in November Woods or the Northern Ballad No. 2.

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