The Two Pieces for small orchestra are exquisite tone poems depicting two adjacent seasons. They were written after Delius completed his last opera, Fennimore and Gerda, which demonstrated the shift to his later style of composition. These two works, however, also look back to his earlier, very personal style. Both are scored for a reduced orchestra of flute, oboe, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, and strings.

"On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring" (1912) opens on a beautiful sustained major seventh chord followed by the oboe introducing a pastoral bird-like pattern. Then "with easy flowing movement," a song in triple meter is introduced in the strings with drones in the cellos and basses. The simple, sweet, pastoral, modal melody is harmonized by Delius with chromatic passing tones that at times give the impression of bitonality when set against the lower harmonic roots. The melody is built in cumulative phrases, until the oboe has learned the whole tune and now steps forward as a solo underscored by lovely strings. The clarinet then comes forward with an authentic "cuckoo" call. The middle section of the tune is developed as the "cuckoo" clarinet enters at several points. The strings create a small looping pattern just before the ending, and manifest some simple yet rich new harmonies. A major chord dies away to silence. The piece is based on the Norwegian folk song "In Ola Valley, in Ola Dale," and is, to some extent, a transcription of Edvard Grieg's own treatment of the piece in his Norwegian Folksongs for piano, Op. 66.

"Summer-night on the river" (1911), one of the few thoroughly impressionist pieces by this composer, opens with gently sighing winds, over a droning pedal point in the muted double basses, and sustained horn notes. The string section enters, their muted sound creating a rich yet somber timbre. There is the beginning of a sea-faring melody but it quickly transforms into undulating figures and trills that perfectly describe a flowing river. A solo cello sings out with a lyrical theme, which is taken over by a solo violin, soon joined by a solo viola, all surrounded by the flowing patterns. The solo violin melody becomes "softer and softer as if dying away in the distance." There is a mystical and atmospheric coda with trilling chromatics in the solo violin, supported by sustained and pizzicato strings. The river in question is the Loing, upon which the wildly blossoming garden of Delius' villa, in the French village of Grez, near Fontainebleau, faced; this distilled tone poem—playing between six and seven minutes—is the upshot of many meditative hours spent there.

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1.On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring

Grieg was the first musician of stature to recognize Delius' genius, and his recommendation was decisive in persuading the composer's father to allow young Fritz—as he was known then—to pursue music as a career. The two became close friends, and Delius visited the Griegs often on his walking tours of Norway until syphilis, which rendered him a complete invalid by the early 1920s, began its ravages. In 1912, Delius completed Song of the High Hills, for large orchestra and wordless chorus, in a monumentally exalted tribute to those happy Wanderjahre. Then he turned immediately to the composition of what has become his most popular piece, On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring, which takes up No. 14 of Grieg's Norwegian Folk Tunes, Op. 66 ("In Ola Valley") and works upon it the magic of the Delian miniature. About seven minutes long, First Cuckoo is a fluent meditation on Grieg's piece, a sort of musical free association in which the melody is broken into phrases and each phrase is developed, garbed in glowing new color, and lingered over as the clarinet laconically iterates the cuckoo's drooping call. The result is at once blithe, elegiac, and rife with nostalgia—the frail Grieg had passed on in 1907. First performed in Leipzig under conductor Arthur Nikisch with Summer Night on the River on October 23, 1913, On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring was published by Oxford University Press as the first of the Two Pieces for Small Orchestra.

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2.Summer Night on the River

Summer Night on the River, composed in 1911, is the second of the Two Pieces for Small Orchestra, the first of which is the celebrated "On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring." The river in question is the Loing, upon which the wildly blossoming garden of Delius' villa, in the French village of Grez, near Fontainebleau, faced; this distilled tone poem—playing between six and seven minutes—is the upshot of many meditative hours spent there.

Delius' friend, the Italian composer, pianist, and philosopher of music, Ferruccio Busoni, described his own goal in composition as "dissolving the form into the feeling." Similarly, in performance he sought to achieve a state of Auflösung—or "dematerialization"—in which music should transcend mere notes and register as a direct spiritual prehension. To the predominantly intellectual Busoni, these qualities were ever elusive and consistently achieved only at the end of his life. For Delius it all came quite naturally, and perhaps nowhere else is more concentrated form than in Summer Night on the River. How atmospheric Delius' mature art became may be gauged by comparison with, say, the orchestral piece Summer Evening, of two decades before, which essays similar emotions. The latter is far closer to textbook procedure in having a recognizable, even effusive, melody worked by rule of thumb to an effect of great charm and conviction. Close examination of Summer Night on the River, on the other hand, reveals the musical materials to be of the most rudimentary sort—mere fragments of melody, scalar sliding, a muted two-note call, an impassioned viola arabesque, and so on. Delius' model is probably the Prelude to Wagner's Tristan, or any of a number of brief, mosaic-like passages in Parsifal, but instead of the erotically overheated, sickly ambience of those works, Delius evokes a blithesome rapport verging on the mystical, an audible "dematerialization" in which Summer Night's alleged formlessness wings into—coheres in—a feeling of compelling magic.

Summer Night on the River was given its premiere, with its companion piece, in Leipzig, October 23, 1913, under the baton of the legendary Artur Nikisch. After rehearsal, Delius wrote to his wife that "First Cuckoo" had been "rather too slow," but Summer Night on the River "He played most beautifully—perfect...."

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