Cyril Scott

From the 19th century onwards, the works of Johann Sebastian Bach enjoyed immense popularity among the greatest pianists of the time. Whether Franz Liszt, Camille Saint-Saëns or Sergei Rachmaninov, they all arranged works by the Baroque master for solo piano. Less well known are the numerous Bach transcriptions for two pianos.

Das Schaffen von Johann Sebastian Bach erfreute sich ab dem 19. Jahrhundert ungemeiner Beliebtheit bei den größten Pianisten der Zeit. Ob Franz Liszt, Camille Saint-Saëns oder Sergej Rachmaninow, sie alle haben Werke des Barockmeisters für Klavier solo bearbeitet. Weniger bekannt sind die ebenfalls zahlreichen Bach-Transkriptionen für zwei Klaviere.

It was a musical cocktail born in a marketing meeting: Two parts easy listening, one part jazz, a healthy dollop of conga drums, a sprinkling of bird calls, and a pinch of textless choir. Serve garnished with an alluring woman on the album jacket for best results. Liberty Records co-founder Si Waronker called it Exotica; the soundtrack for a mythical air conditioned Eden, packaged for mid-century, tiki torch-wielding armchair safariers. In the five years after Exotica—Martin Denny’s 1957 landmark Liberty debut—arrived, hundreds of other ethnographic forgeries washed up in record racks all over the U.S., bearing titles like Sophisticated Savage, Sacred Idol, Chant of the Jungle, Polynesian Paradise, Exotic Paradise, Taboo, Primitiva, Forbidden Island, Afrodesia, Hypnotique, Percussion Exotique, and a barrel’s worth of other portmanteaus. “All of those ica and itiva endings I came up with because I thought I was being cute,” Waronker said. “And I don’t know why, but nobody got wise.”

Ein einzigartiges Gespräch zwischen der Musik von Cyril Scott, George Enescu und Maurice Ravel.

Comme le titre de son nouveau disque « A British Promenade » l'indique, la harpiste Sandrine Chatron nous propose une déambulation musicale dans l'Angleterre du début du xxe siècle. On y croise des compositeurs rares au disque, comme Herbert Howells ou Cyril Scott, mais aussi Benjamin Britten. Les pages qu'ils composèrent pour la harpe nous transportent dans les paysages côtiers ou plus champêtres de nos voisins anglais. Leurs évocations sont également déclinées par la chaleur du violoncelle d'Ophélie Gaillard et le lyrisme du ténor Michael Bennett qui viennent enrichir la palette sonore de l'époque en faisant contrepoint à l'expression plus pointilliste de la harpe.

Cyril Meir Scott is one of a group of British composers to have benefitted from three cultural features of recent decades: increased curiosity from performers and listeners; a more inclusive outlook from musicologists and critics; and the music industry spotting a gap and a demand. A much more colourful picture of British music in the first half of the twentieth century has resulted. Scott was a prolific writer of fiction and non-fiction as well as a composer of several hundred pieces. His writings and music are deeply invested in mysticism and the occult. This element in Scott’s work, as Sarah Collins has noted, helps us to see beyond received notions of Scott as either a trivial exoticist or an unjustly-neglected pioneer, and to appreciate his music on its own terms.