Festival Overture / Concerto for Violin and Orchestra / etc

"Another strong entrant in the Scott renaissance which continues to assault both ignorance and the accumulation of ill-informed assumptions about this fine composer"
(MusicWeb July 2007)

In the third volume of the orchestral works of Cyril Scott, Martyn Brabbins and BBC Philharmonic take us further on the journey of this unique composer's musical landscape. Although an English composer, Scott studied composition in Frankfurt at the Hock Conservatoire, and became part of the 'Frankfurt Gang', which included Percy Grainger and Roger Quilter. Scott, however, eventually went his own way having absorbed a Germanic view of musical culture during these impressionable years. Far ahead of his time in many ways Scott was one of the more remarkable men of his generation. As John Ireland his friend and contemporary wrote to Scott 'You were the first British composer to write music which was non-academic, free and individual in style and of primary significance.'

Scott was enormously active in his late teens and his twenties, and many works conceived then were revised over a lifetime, not achieving their final form until much later. Three of these are featured on our programme. These include the broodingly dark Violin Concerto, strongly influenced by Stravinsky and Bartók, performed by Olivier Charlier who brilliantly spins the expressive rhapsodic line and burgeoning melody. This is coupled with the exquisitely atmospheric tone poem Festival Overture for which Scott won the Daily Telegraph orchestral competition in 1933, and Three Symphonic Dances, Op. 22. Scott's earlier works have tended to be eclipsed by his later works; and at the expense of his large orchestral scores - but these great works now receive the attention they deserve.

Scott is undoubtedly an extraordinary example of a once leading figure, writing in an apparently advanced idiom early on; who increasingly became persona non-grata with the musical establishment and the established idioms of the day in the inter-war years. This exploratory series has begun to rectify this, and this third volume is sure to inspire further converts.

Reviews
'This release represents a remarkable discovery in 20th-century British music: excellent recording, too.'
Gramophone on Volume 1