COMPOSERS: Scott
LABELS: Chandos
WORKS: Piano Trio Nos 1 & 2; Trio for Clarinet, Cello & Piano; Clarinet Quintet; Cornish Boat Song
PERFORMER: Mia Cooper (violin), Robert Plane (clarinet), David Adams (viola); Gould Piano Trio
CATALOGUE NO: CHAN 10575
Between them, Chandos and Dutton have totally transformed the Cyril Scott discography in the past few years, so that we begin to know this elusive and prolific composer much better; but there are still treasures
to find. Chandos continues the process with a valuable disc of chamber music. Only one piece – the expansive, passionate and highly-coloured Piano Trio No. 1, written during World War I – dates from Scott’s period of greatest celebrity as ‘the English Debussy’: in fact, it recalls Ravel and Scriabin more clearly. The other works are a cluster from the 1950s when his music was deeply out of fashion and he had distilled his experience into a highly chromatic but fluidly tonal idiom.
Only the amiable 1951 Clarinet Quintet for Gervase de Peyer has been recorded before, but it’s the 1955 Clarinet Trio, first performed in New Zealand, that seems the most striking and characterful work here. The excellent Gould Trio are the stalwarts of this enjoyable disc. Calum MacDonald