It’s about time! Cyril Scott remains one of the undiscovered treasures of the English musical renaissance, a composer of talent with a distinctive style, though as this admirable disc demonstrates, his range was not terribly wide. The music here sounds like a mixture of Debussy, Ravel, and Scriabin. In other words, it’s lush, impressionistic, often chromatic, but never as heavy as the Russian nor quite as supple as the two Frenchmen. An occasional modal tinge gives Scott a distinctly English cast, and there are probably more harp glissandos per minute in all three works than in the music of any other composer. For this reason I wouldn’t recommend taking it all in at a sitting: there is a certain sense of sameness despite the brilliant coloring and alluring textures.
Symphony No. 3 (1937) was dedicated to Beecham, who never performed it, and its scoring includes important parts for wind machine, organ, and wordless chorus (in the finale), making a sort of English Daphnis and Chloe meets The Poem of Ecstasy. The elusive approach to form, tonal fluidity, and dearth of clear-cut melodies makes the piece sound much longer than its 34 minutes. You never quite know where you are in it, but this hardly matters as virtually every moment is texturally ravishing. It’s like a box of really good chocolate truffles: it may be bad for you but you just can’t resist them even as the very thought of eating them all horrifies you.
Piano Concerto No. 2 is necessarily a bit bonier. It dates from 1958, two decades after the symphony, and in its three brief movements it bears scant resemblance to the First Piano Concerto, which enjoyed brief life on Lyrita and sadly has never made it to CD. Howard Shelley does an excellent job making the solo part sound meaningful and goal-oriented, and at 20 minutes the piece hardly has time to outstay its welcome. Indeed, the contrast between the richly textured accompaniments and the harmonic acerbity of much of the solo writing is quite compelling.
Neptune: Poem of the Sea (1935), which began life as “Disaster at Sea”, a tone poem describing the sinking of the Titanic, also brings back the wind machine and organ. Here, revised in a slightly less narrative form, it sounds just like the symphony, and if Scott had called the piece “Symphony in One Movement” we would be none the wiser for all that the formal aspects of the medium seem to have concerned him.
Chandos has generously given us nearly 80 minutes of music here, all admirably performed by Martyn Brabbins, who strikes me as very sympathetic both to the idiom and to the need never to let the music come to a sensuous standstill. In the last movement of the symphony, the work of the Huddersfield Choral Society does not sound quite as rhythmically sharp as it might be–but then the vocal writing must be terrifically awkward, and with such unfamiliar music we probably have no right to expect perfection. Certainly this comes close enough, with excellent sonics to boot. I hope that Chandos continues to mine what looks to be a particularly fruitful vein of unfamiliar music. It’s the kind of thing the label almost always does best.
