Cyril Meir Scott is one of a group of British composers to have benefitted from three cultural features of recent decades: increased curiosity from performers and listeners; a more inclusive outlook from musicologists and critics; and the music industry spotting a gap and a demand. A much more colourful picture of British music in the first half of the twentieth century has resulted. Scott was a prolific writer of fiction and nonfiction as well as a composer of several hundred pieces. His writings and music are deeply invested in mysticism and the occult. This element in Scott’s work, as Sarah Collins has noted, helps us to see beyond received notions of Scott as either a trivial exoticist or an unjustly-neglected pioneer, and to appreciate his music on its own terms.
Simon Callaghan performs internationally as a soloist and chamber musician, in parallel with a highly successful career as a recording artist. Simon Callaghan’s distinguished and eclectic discography includes recordings for Hyperion, Nimbus and Lyrita among others. He has a strong profile on BBC Radio3 and on a variety of streaming platforms, his most recent single on Apple Music with Coco Tomita surpassing 1 million streams in the first month of its release. He is a strong social media enthusiast, using it as a form of promotion for classical music in general but seeing it as a particular tool in his advocacy of the rare and unexplored. Director of Music at London’s celebrated Conway Hall, only the sixth incumbent since the founding of the series in 1887. He was elected a Steinway Artist in 2012.
