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Cyril SCOTT (1879-1970) Festival
Overture for Orchestra (chorus and organ ad libitum) (1902, revised
1912 and 1929) [10:34] Violin
Concerto (ded. LKVG) (c. 1925) [21:55] * Aubade
for large orchestra, Op. 77 (To My Friend Landon Ronald) (1905, revised
c. 1911) [10:43] Three
Symphonic Dances, Op. 22 (revised from Symphony No. 2 (1901-02))
(c. 1907) [17:59]
Olivier Charlier (violin) Sheffield Philharmonic Chorus/Darius
Battiwalla BBC
Philharmonic/Martyn Brabbins rec.
Studio 7, New Broadcasting House, Manchester, 16 and 17 March 2006 *
premiere recording
CHANDOS CHAN 10407
[61:40]
Scott’s centenary year fell in 1979. The man himself
missed it by only nine years. In those pre-compact disc days
the ‘celebrations’ passed with hardly a tremor of recognition.
Things have improved dramatically in the last five years. The
BBC have broadcast the Violin Concerto and Dutton have now reached
the third double volume in their complete traversal of the Scott
solo piano music. There are other CDs too including one from
the Austrian Genuin label. The two earlier Chandos volumes have
now been joined by the return of John Ogdon’s pioneering Lyrita
recordings of the two piano concertos. In addition Chandos are
busy recording the Cello Concerto and Symphony No. 1 for volume
4. The Cello Sonata is also being recorded.
The
Festival Overture is reminiscent of the diaphanous
textures of the First Piano Concerto and touches on territory
mapped out by Debussy’s Faun. It’s a gorgeously lush impressionistic
piece rising to a rather redundant choral conclusion. The music
began life as yet another response to Maeterlinck; in this case
the Princess Maleine. Scott wrote a number of other Maeterlinck-inspired
works including Aglavaine et Selysette and Pelléas et
Mélisande. The Violin Concerto is a sultry and yet
more subtle verdant outpouring which should appeal to anyone who
loves the Szymanowski First Concerto or the Violin and Cello Concertos
by Bax and Delius. The worldweary sighing of the violin solo at
4:50 in the first movement must surely have influenced Bax
in the writing of the Cello Concerto. A further linkage – this
time with Delius – is that the Scott was premiered by one of Delius’s
favourites, May Harrison. The Aubade has been done before
(on Marco Polo) but not as well as this. It’s another evocative
work strongly suggestive of Bax’s classical phase (Nympholept,
Enchanted Summer, The Happy Forest and, most strongly
of all, the symphony Spring Fire). The Three Symphonic
Dances continue a thread running through the first two
volumes: Scott’s symphonies. These Dances represent all we are
ever likely to hear of Scott’s four movement Second Symphony.
It seems that the first movement of the symphony has disappeared
completely. I can discern nothing of the dance in the hyper-romantic
Tchaikovskian central dance but both the outer movements do refer
to dance rhythms even if they are ecstatically glimpsed through
a refracting glass: part Chabrier and part Franck (Psyché).
Another strong entrant in
the Scott renaissance which continues to assault both ignorance
and the accumulation of ill-informed assumptions about this fine
composer.
Rob Barnett
Previous
reviews of the Chandos Cyril Scott series Vol.
1 Lloyd;
Clarke; Vol.
2 Barnett;
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