Florida Suite

Frederick Delius

Members of the Solari team are headed to a Florida meeting with the first cohort of Solari’s “Young Builders.” The students gathered are proving to be an extraordinarily talented and motivated group of young people who are pioneering productivity, family wealth, and freedom for the next generation.

This Music of the Week celebrates the great state of Florida with Frederick Delius’s sumptuous and beautiful Florida Suite. Delius (1862–1934) composed it between 1886-87, while he was studying at the Leipzig Conservatory, and it premiered there in 1888. Attending this first private performance were composers Edvard Grieg, Christian Sinding, and Delius himself. It was not until 1937 that the piece was again performed, posthumously, by London’s Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.

A few years before composing this piece, Delius was manager of an orange grove by St. Johns River in Florida. His experiences there inspired this piece of classical “program music” that paints the bright landscapes and clement weather of Florida. To Delius, Florida’s tropical beauty, lush colors, and sweet aromas—together with the sounds of the gospel-singing Black plantation workers—were all part of a single musical composition.