“This is fascinating music and very persuasively played, too: the Archaeus Quartet respond to its harmonic freedom, catching its vitality and delicate evocation. Tony Faulkner’s recording has tangible presence."
Ivan March, The Gramophone, Awards 2004 The Guardian Friday March 26 2004
review by Andrew Clements
3 stars
Dutton's Epoch label seems to be turning into a home for British music's foundlings, but Cyril Scott (1879-1970) is one of the more deserving of those waifs and strays. His works, heavily imprinted with French impressionism and the harmonic workings of Scriabin, are hardly ever performed nowadays, and he is remembered more for his interest in eastern philosophies and the occult than for his music.
This well played and recorded trio of string quartets provides a handy resumé of the direction in which Scott developed - from the curious hybrid world of the First, composed in 1918, in which Debussyian harmonies are juxtaposed with an unlikely folksy athleticism, through the more astringent, yet more clearly English world of the Second from 1951, to the austerity and anguished harmonies of the Fourth, completed just two years before his death.
