Symphony No 3 & Charade

BBC Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by George Lloyd.


"Some dozen years ago I decided I must get rid of my early pieces; anything written before my opera "Iernin" was suspect. I had a glorious bonfire and would have added my first three symphonies to the flames. There was a difficulty; by the time I was clearing away all this debris I had written seven more symphonies and I could not face having to change all the names and numberings on the scores and orchestral parts. The simplest course was to revise the first three and leave them to take their fate. This I did for Nos. 1 & 2 but the Third has been left virtually as it was apart from a few very small additions. I wrote the first three symphonies when I was 19 and at that time, with all the arrogance of youth, I greatly disliked large symphonies in the romantic style - except for Elgar's No. 2, which I still believe is the best symphony ever written by an Englishman. So I decided that if I wrote symphonies they would be short. If I was deadly serious when I wrote my Third Symphony I certainly had my tongue in my cheek for Charade, which is subtitled scenes from the '60s. It was written in 1968 and is a send-up of some of the oddities of that decade; I greatly enjoyed making fun of the period.