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"The directness of [Lloyd's] expression coupled with the catchiness of his themes makes his music almost irresistible to listeners fed up with arid atonality and eviscerated serialism. Each Symphony here is gigantic in scale - the four-movement Fourth lasts an hour - and each stands a good chance of thrilling those who have worked their way through the English symphonic canon looking for a melodically appealing composer as brightly colourful as Bantock, structurally spacious as Bax, and harmonically advanced as Stanford. The Philharmonia gives [Downes] performances of persuasive professionalism. Lyrita's early 80s stereo recordings sound wonderfully clear and open." James Leonard, allmusic.com
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‘I just write what I have to write’. The artistic credo of George Lloyd (1913-1998) conveys the directness and emotional honesty of his music. He wrote in a traditional idiom enriched by a close study of selected models, Verdi and Berlioz chief among them. His music is not derivative, however. It is distinctive and written with integrity. There is a remarkable consistency to his output, most of which was created spontaneously and without the incentive of a commission. He was fortunate enough to discover his individual and versatile musical voice at an early age. The deceptively artless quality of his scores stems from a rigorous grounding in composition techniques.
Lloyd had found a champion of his music in conductor Edward Downes (1924-2009). Downes conducted the first performance of Lloyd’s Eighth Symphony (1961, orchestrated 1965) with the BBC Northern Symphony Orchestra, broadcast on Radio 3 on 4 July 1977. Many listeners were stopped in their tracks by the work’s melodic strength and imaginative scoring. This turning point in the composer’s fortunes marked the beginning of the public’s demand for performances and recordings of his music. In the succeeding five years Downes tirelessly promoted and disseminated Lloyd’s works. Paul Conway
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Conceived on a grand scale, Lloyd’s late choral works build fruitfully upon his previous experience in other genres. They share with his operas an innate lyricism, natural affinity with the human voice and feeling for the long line, while their structural balance, intensive working out of motifs and rich orchestral palette owes a significant debt to his prolific symphonic output.
Chris de Souza writing in The Independent, 1998, described the Brighton Festival commission of A Symphonic Mass as ‘perhaps the climax’ of Lloyd’s ‘astonishing career’. In his review of the original release of the present recording, Ivan March was moved to describe the Mass as ‘one of the finest pieces of English choral writing of the twentieth century’.
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![George Lloyd: The Symphonies Nos. 1 - 6 conducted by the composer [4CDs]](/media/com_eshop/products/resized/srcd2417_cover-180x180.jpg "George Lloyd: The Symphonies Nos. 1 - 6 conducted by the composer [4CDs]")
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Lloyd became a symphonist despite himself. When he was in his twenties he seemed destined to be a composer of operas and it is likely that, had the vicissitudes of war not intervened, he would have written music for the stage exclusively. In an article for the June 1939 issue of the Musical Monthly Record, Harry Farjeon wondered why music for Lloyd was ‘not centred in the concert hall but in the theatre’ and quoted the young composer as being ‘interested only in opera’.
There are strong traces in the symphonies of what might have been: the intensely lyrical, cantabile nature of the writing; the intermezzo-like movements; the opera buffa qualities of the finales and the feeling for the long line which runs through those supple and sweeping melodies all denote a born opera composer. In the event his operatic aspirations were cruelly cut short and it is to his courageous, life-affirming twelve symphonies that we must look to chart his development, recovery and eventual triumph.
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![George Lloyd: The Symphonies Nos. 7 - 12 conducted by the composer [4CDs]](/media/com_eshop/products/resized/srcd2418_cover-180x180.jpg "George Lloyd: The Symphonies Nos. 7 - 12 conducted by the composer [4CDs]")
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Lloyd became a symphonist despite himself. When he was in his twenties he seemed destined to be a composer of operas and it is likely that, had the vicissitudes of war not intervened, he would have written music for the stage exclusively. In an article for the June 1939 issue of the Musical Monthly Record, Harry Farjeon wondered why music for Lloyd was ‘not centred in the concert hall but in the theatre’ and quoted the young composer as being ‘interested only in opera’. There are strong traces in the symphonies of what might have been: the intensely lyrical, cantabile nature of the writing; the intermezzo-like movements; the opera buffa qualities of the finales and the feeling for the long line which runs through those supple and sweeping melodies all denote a born opera composer. In the event his operatic aspirations were cruelly cut short and it is to his courageous, life-affirming twelve symphonies that we must look to chart his development, recovery and eventual triumph.
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The effort of writing his Seventh Symphony, with its predominantly tragic tone, at the end of the 1950s had taken a heavy toll on the composer’s mental health and by the start of the following decade he was in a very negative frame of mind. Not for the first time in his life, the act of composing provided the key to alleviating the situation, as he explained: ‘… around the very early sixties, a few darker thoughts – tragic thoughts – began haunting me. With them musical ideas began to formulate and I began to wonder if this might be the time for that piano concerto’.
If the first three piano concertos have the heft and communicative power of Lloyd’s larger middle-period symphonies, the Fourth has a close affinity to the Ninth Symphony, which was completed the previous year. Both pieces exhibit an impish sense of fun, tempered by profound feelings of yearning and regret. George Lloyd approached the piano concerto form with imagination and individuality. His idiomatic solo writing avoids shallow virtuosity and empty rhetoric and there are no mighty tussles between piano and orchestral forces encountered in archetypal large-scale concertante scores. Instead, the composer offers a series of deeply personal attempts to reconcile time-honoured elements of display with symphonic preoccupations of long-range tonality, rhythmic energy and melodic growth. In sum, Lloyd’s four piano concertos constitute a compelling and distinctive branch of his creative legacy. © Paul Conway
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It is significant that, when Lloyd turned his attention to writing concertante works for the violin, he avoided using full orchestral forces. His sensitivity to issues of balance and scrupulousness in scoring in his operas was matched by his determination that the solo instrument in his concertos should not be overwhelmed by thick orchestral textures. As he put it, ‘I don’t really like the relationship between the violin and the big modern orchestra… I hate to hear that poor little fiddle being totally swamped’.
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‘I just write what I have to write’. The artistic credo of George Lloyd conveys the directness and emotional honesty of his music. He wrote in a traditional idiom enriched by a close study of selected models, Verdi and Berlioz chief among them. His music is distinctive and written with integrity. There is a remarkable consistency to his output, most of which was created spontaneously and without the incentive of a commission. He was fortunate enough to discover his individual and versatile musical voice at an early age. The deceptively artless quality of his scores stems from a thorough grounding in composition techniques.
As a violinist, Lloyd was drawn to stringed instruments rather than the keyboard. His wife, Nancy had a very different attitude to the piano, however. Having been brought up listening to records of Alfred Cortot, among other great pianists, she had developed a genuine passion for the instrument. She was always urging her husband to write a piano concerto, but it was not until the early 1960s that those years of persuasion paid off and Lloyd wrote Scapegoat, the first of his series of four piano concertos.
Now the composer had overcome his previous aversion to the keyboard, as he put it, ‘Suddenly, everything I thought of, I thought in terms of the piano’. From this dramatic change of heart emerged several works for solo piano. © Paul Conway
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- available to download and stream from all Digital Platforms
Conceived on a grand scale, Lloyd’s late choral works build fruitfully upon his previous experience in other genres. They share with his operas an innate lyricism, natural affinity with the human voice and feeling for the long line, while their structural balance, intensive working out of motifs and rich orchestral palette owes a significant debt to his prolific symphonic output.
Lloyd produced the final score of his Requiem a month before his death. It is inscribed ‘to the memory of Diana
Princess of Wales’. Compassionate, reassuring and even, at times, joyful, this is a conscious leave-taking on the part of the composer. His compact and cogent setting of Psalm 130 constitutes, arguably, his most fluently effective use of a cappella choral writing.
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George Lloyd started to learn the violin at the age of five and he was a pupil of the violinist Albert Sammons for six years. In his youth, Lloyd’s talent as an instrumentalist allowed him to participate in local musical events from formal concerts to more convivial gatherings: a 1930 newspaper report of a ‘social in the Zennor schoolroom’ observed that ‘Mr George Lloyd played the violin and dancing was indulged in’. Looking back on his formative influences, Lloyd singled out Sammons as having the most lasting effect on his burgeoning creativity, identifying the latter’s ‘instinctive, freely expressive playing’ as having a direct bearing on the kind of music he began to write. In this regard, Lloyd’s description of the sound of Sammons’s playing as ‘gorgeous’, with ‘a lyrical quality’ in which ‘every note seemed to sing’ chimes with the composer’s own essentially lyrical approach to musical lines and phrases.
Despite his facility in playing the violin and the importance he attached to his lessons with Albert Sammons, Lloyd was relatively slow to compose works for his own instrument. It was not until 1970 that Lloyd wrote Violin Concerto No.1, his first piece with a leading role for his own instrument, but this achievement seemed to stir his enthusiasm and during the next seven years he completed a number of pieces for violin and piano, a fully-fledged sonata and a second concerto. The Seven Extracts from ‘The Serf’ for violin and piano (1974) were published in 2024, and are here recorded for the first time. © Paul Conway
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George Lloyd was very familiar with music for brass from an early age. One of his first musical recollections was listening with rapt attention to a Salvation Army Band with his mother in St Ives. As a student, he attended regularly brass band concerts at London’s Crystal Palace, where he heard the premiere of John Ireland’s A Downland Suite at the National Band Festival Competition on 1 October 1932. Lloyd played the cornet when serving as a Bandsman in the Royal Marines, giving him invaluable practical experience as an executant within a group of players. His scoring for the brass section in his large-scale works is invariably idiomatic, impressively wrought and indicates a keen understanding of all the instruments’ range, character and versatility. Yet, despite all these indications that he was a natural composer of brass band music, he turned to writing music for brass instruments only in the last two decades of his creative life.
Though music for brass band was the last major genre Lloyd added to his catalogue of works, his enthusiasm for the medium, once he had embraced it, was unstinting. The wide popularity of his music within the brass band movement was an enduring source of considerable pride and satisfaction for George Lloyd, as he once confessed: ‘To realise that the people who are actually doing it, the players themselves … seem to like it, that is what pleases me the most’. © Paul Conway
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