With Cyril Scott: Lotus Land, Canadian pianist
Leslie De'Ath reaches the fifth volume of his complete survey of the piano music of British composer
Cyril Scott for Dutton's Epoch series. The conventional wisdom about
Scott is that he was a composer of light, insubstantial music for salon pianists and that his compositions are not worth the countless printed pages that they occupy. However, what has proven so impressive about
De'Ath's project thus far is that it makes clear that
Scott's music is serious, and it plays a significant role in the development of early modernism.
De'Ath's series also opens a window upon a composer who was a greatly imaginative musical thinker and a pictorialist on a par with Edward MacDowell. This disc leads off with Lotus Land,
Scott's most famous piece, and takes us through the cream of his crop inasmuch as the public response to his printed music can afford such insight, along with some things
De'Ath himself finds of exceptional significance.
Anya Alexeyev, a superb talent, contributes a second pair of hands toward the end of this volume.
Lotus Land seems impossibly modern for 1905, the year
Debussy published his first book of Images, and
Ravel, Miroirs. Lotus Land additionally possesses a preternatural sense of jazziness that the French works do not have. Nevertheless, despite its great popularity there would come a time when even Lotus Land was perceived to have worn out its welcome, joining a category also reserved for number of MacDowell's most popular piano works. Although by that time, MacDowell was long dead,
Scott was alive, still composing, and impoverished. This collection answers the prevailing perception about
Cyril Scott in that it makes clear he had a rather slow and deliberate manner of stylistic development.
Scott may have been way ahead of the curve in 1905, by 1922
Scott had managed to catch up to what was current in, say, 1912; by 1934, he had caught up to 1922 and so forth. In his early pieces, some demonstrate telltale signs of having been handed into the publisher a little too early; repeats are taken literally when a variant form of the repeated theme might have been a bit more elegant --
Debussy is resolutely transparent in this regard. Likewise, in certain early pieces
Scott tends to concentrate a bit too much of his music into the center of the keyboard, though by about 1914 he had found himself a way out of this working method. Nevertheless, none of this means that you should not listen;
Scott was innovative in numerous other ways, and this innovative spirit is never lurking very far away from his music. In Arabesque (1923), he utilizes "block chords" in a manner that calls
McCoy Tyner to mind, and the Pastoral Ode (1961) could almost pass for an improvisation by
Bill Evans or Lennie Tristano.
Scott took a keen interest in genre and had something unique to add to practically every keyboard form; his Barcarolle (1912) has a 6/8 rhythm and burbles along just like a gondola, and his Tarantula (1935) definitively references the energetic Italian dance step so beloved of
Busoni. However, sometimes there is a deliberate confusion, or recasting, of genre into something else; his An English Waltz (1903) could almost be mistaken for a Spanish work of Albéniz owing to its handling of the waltz rhythm, and the Caprice chinois (1919) is an experimental piece that almost feels like a distillation of gestures typically used in Western, pseudo-Chinese character pieces, although there is nothing specifically Chinese about it. This, of course, makes
Scott all the more fascinating. If one is looking for a single-disc survey of
Cyril Scott that hits the high points, then it would be hard to find a better package than this, even though it is generously two discs priced as one; Dutton and
Leslie De'Ath's Cyril Scott: Lotus Land is highly recommended overall.