Piano Quintet must hear

[petershott@btinternet.com]

Piano Quintets form part of the indispensable furniture of the ideal world, so perhaps appropriate to resurrect this thread.

In the last week I've gained increasing pleasure with several 'hearings' of a fairly recent British Music Society disc - the Bingham Quartet and Raphael Terroni playing the 1st Cyril Scott Pf Quintet and that of Frank Bridge. Already on the shelves are recordings of both works, but a couple of especially enthusiastic reviews of the present disc in MusicWeb led me to suspend scrupulous control of the budget and to acquire the disc.

Bloomin' marvellous! I guess most will be familiar with the Bridge work, but it was the Scott in particular that drew me to the disc. Like the earlier Pf Quintets by Schumann, Brahms, Franck, Stanford and Dvorak (all, in my view, utter masterpieces) the Scott work is a big and passionate work. It takes some work to get to know it. You can't, for example, go for a post-hearing prowl and reflect on the work by humming or hearing with the inner ear some of the principal melodies - they slither out of your grasp. As with many of his other works - and especially the orchestral ones - Scott doesn't help casual listeners by (deliberately?) not providing headlines or landmarks. Each movement 'slithers', and although I hit on that word accidentally I think it perhaps a good word to mark a characteristic of Scott's compositional style.

In respect of that there's a nice anecdote in the CD booklet (a gem actually written by Giles Easterbrook). He tells the story that when Shaw complimented Elgar "that 'for an Englishman' his harmonies sounded remarkably modern" Elgar replied "you mustn't forget that it was Cyril Scott who started all that." Spot on!

The Quintet forms a 40 minute journey through an imposing landscape, and after travelling through it you're conscious of deep satisfaction - and some exhaustion. Would be magnificent to hear it in the concert hall. The final sentence of the notes read "The mood is then flamboyantly restored in a grand roundup of earlier material, as befits a work with creative unity as its spiritual agenda, and rushes headlong to end in a massive fortissimo of rich sustained strings and crashing piano chords." Ah, isn't that what music is about? I get excited reading that sentence and then recollecting the ending!

One respect in which the CD produced some dismay. The notes tell us that when the idea of the CD was first mooted with Raphael Terroni the initial plan was to couple the Scott with the Holbrooke Pf Quintet. The latter dates from 1904, and made such a powerful impression that both Bridge or Scott composing just a few years afterwards were writing in its shadow. Alas, with Raphael Terroni's cruel and fairly sudden death last year we shall never hear such a recording. And what an urgent need there surely is for a good modern recording of the Holbrooke Pf Quintet. I have a reasonable enough Marco Polo recording (from I think the early 1990s), but just contemplate what a whizz-bang thing a wonderful recording would be by, for example, Hyperion. Actually looking at the Holbrooke worklist, there are many significant chamber works lacking any recording. The world after all is not quite perfect.