Cyril Scott (1879 - 1970), Early One Morning for piano and orchestra (1930 - 1931, rev. 1962)
Performed by Howard Shelley (piano), BBC Philharmonic Orchestra cond. Martyn Brabbins
Scott was essentially a late romantic composer, whose style was at the same time strongly influenced by impressionism. His harmony was notably exotic. If in his early works it was perhaps over-sweet (Alban Berg dismissed his music as 'mushy'), it became steadily more varied and more refined in his later years. Indeed it is his late works (written between 1950 and his death) that are the most individual, with their ever-shifting harmonic colours and wayward inflections of phrase and mood, capturing perfectly the way the mind shifts, backwards and forwards, between reminiscence, regrets, and self-assertion.
Scott wrote around four hundred works (though the number is deceptive, since more than half of these were short songs or piano pieces). These include two mature symphonies, three operas, three piano concertos, concertos for violin, cello, oboe and harpsichord, and three double concertos (of which the scores are now lost), several overtures, four oratorios (Nativity Hymn (1913), Mystic Ode (1932), Ode to Great Men (1936), and Hymn of Unity (1947), as well as a mass of chamber music (four mature quartets, five violin sonatas, three piano trios, and many others). Between 1903 and 1920 Scott wrote copiously for the piano. Most of these pieces were harmonically adventurous for their time and easy to play; they circulated widely in many countries of the world, in contrast to his more ambitious works, none of which received more than a handful of performances.
Scott was called the "Father of modern British music" by Eugene Goossens, and was also appreciated by Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, his close friend Percy Grainger, Richard Strauss and Igor Stravinsky. His experiments in free rhythm, generated by expanding musical motifs, above all in his First Piano Sonata of 1909, appear to have exerted an influence on Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring. He used to be known as 'the English Debussy', though this reflected little knowledge of Scott and little understanding of Debussy.
For most of us, acquainted (if at all) with his many piano encores, his chamber music and early orchestral works, Cyril Scott was a composer of the first quarter of the twentieth century, and he is certainly a potent instance of a once flamboyant figure, writing at the cutting edge of modernism, who later found that the world had passed him by. Unsympathetic to the idioms that came to prevail after the First World War, Scott no longer connected with the musical establishment. Yet for all that, he went on composing with a personal vision which is only unfamiliar to us because his later big orchestral works have not been heard.
A single-movement work for piano and orchestra, Early One Morning was composed in 1930 - 31 and published in a reduction for two pianos. It is not clear whether it was performed in the composer’s lifetime; a performance reputed to have been given by Dan Godfrey at Bournemouth cannot be documented. The piece is based on the traditional tune ‘Early One Morning’.
The composer described the music as very ethereal in character, yet totally unlike the ethereality of Debussy even in his most subtle vein. Moreover, it possesses the spontaneity of an improvisation and might be so termed were it not for its distinct though somewhat unusual form. Many of the figurations in the solo part will be familiar from his piano pieces.
Scott left a typescript programme note pasted on the score (it is now in the Percy Grainger Museum at the University of Melbourne, and reprinted here with permission), which reads as follows:
The Poem opens atmospherically on the strings with a melodic and subdued phrase alternating between 7 / 8 and 5 / 8 time. It suggests the quiet mood of sunrise on a peaceful summer morning when there is just a slight haze. Presently the piano enters with arpeggios on an unusual chord (characteristic of the composer’s later style) and followed by cascade-like fi gures which joyously create the impression of songful birds: the piano is supported by a sustained chord on the orchestra. A few bars of the opening phrase are then repeated (orchestra alone), after which there is a solo passage for piano built on the first phrase but accentuating the joyous mood. This leads to a modification of the well-known air Early One Morning, given out on the oboe. Finally the piano takes up the air in its original form, though with novel and ingenious harmonies. It then goes through various transformations and developments, during which the opening phrase is again heard. Eventually after a considerable crescendo a climax is reached, then gradually there is a simmering-down amid a repetition of the cascade-like figures. The work ends poetically on a pianissimo.
13 май 2016
