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 ...
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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...
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