Cyril Scott - Symphony No.3 "The Muses", Piano Concerto No.2

Cyril SCOTT (1879-1970)

Symphony No.3 "The Muses"

Piano Concerto No.2

Neptune (Poem of the Sea)

Howard Shelley (Piano)

The Huddersfield Choral Society

BBC Philharmonic

Martyn Brabbins

Cyril Scott (1879-1970) had the misfortune of too easy success early in his career and mounting neglect for the rest of his life. From as early as 1930 he was being written off as an imitator of Debussy who had nothing more worth saying. Does this adventurous CD confirm or refute this view? Though a lifelong lover of his music, I have to confess that `The Muses', Scott's first mature symphony, is like the curate's egg, good in parts but unacceptable as a whole. It starts well with a sinister and brooding opening movement, but the middle movements are underdeveloped and the choral finale is a watered down version of the General Dance at the end of Ravel's Daphnis and Chloe.

The Second Piano Concerto of 1958 is representative of the far more individual idiom that Scott developed when he returned to composing in the late 1940s. The harmony has an acrid complexity, the phrases are brief, and there is none of the effortless note-spinning that led Colin Matthews to dismiss his earlier music as `vapid'. Unfortunately, the work never establishes a convincing relationship between the soloist and the orchestra, and is full of striking gestures that lead nowhere. The recently recorded Second String Quartet (played by Archaeus Quartet on the Dutton label) is a far more attractive example of his late style.

That leaves `Neptune', which is a revised version of `Disaster at Sea', a long tone poem depicting the sinking of the Titanic that was written in the late 1910s. There was a tardy first performance in 1933, when the critics panned the work as mere film music. Scott responded by removing the more crudely programmatic parts of the score in a revised and renamed version of the work, which was published in 1935 but has gone unperformed till now. I am happy to hail it as a masterpiece. The tragic atmosphere is sustained throughout, and the writing is beautifully diaphanous and full of highly original orchestral effects, which evoke the surge and the spray and the careering bulk of the doomed ship with uncanny vividness; there is nothing finer in Scott than the bleak epilogue depicting the bare and icy ocean as night sets in. In the wake of the famous film, and with the original title restored, could not this work achieve a belated popularity? Certainly this skilfully crafted and richly sonorous recording makes the strongest possible case. It and the Neapolitan Rhapsody (available on a Marco Polo CD) seem to me the two strongest works by Scott for orchestra alone.