Francis George Scott is a key figure in Scotland's musical history. Often referred to as Scotland's Hugo Wolf, his poetic settings draw on material from such writers as Robert Burns and Hugh McDiarmid to convey an extraordinary range of emotions and themes.
The settings Scott made of MacDiarmid poems in the 1920s and early 1930s are the heart of his work. Their poetic range is extraordinary: the condensed madness in Moonstruck, the tenderness of Milkwort and Bog-cotton; self-mocking, grumpy Scottish agitprop in Lourd on my hert, heart-wrenching simplicity in Empty Vessel.
“The songs here are shared between soprano Lisa Milne and baritone Roderick Williams, who capture perfectly the fragile sensitivity of the best songs”
August 2007
“Signum Classics' enterprising sequence reveals a composer of acute poetic instinct, uncompromising integrity and markedly cosmopolitan sensibility… Scott's native roots are abundantly in evidence, and yet, as the exemplary accompanist Iain Burnside states in his enthusiastic and perceptive introduction: "Never is there a whiff of sentimentality, never a glimpse of the shortbread tin." Suffice to say, both Lisa Milne and Roderick Williams sing with idiomatic eloquence and palpable dedication; sound and presentation, too, leave nothing to be desired.”
