Cyril Scott ‒ Early One Morning

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 conce