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I wrote about George Lloyd on the 25th anniversary of his death last year, when Radio 3 allowed me to make a programme about his career as a composer. I have also highlighted his Fourth Symphony – his masterpiece, written in Switzerland in 1945-46 when he was recuperating from shellshock, having been told he would never write music again. I first wrote about Lloyd in this newspaper in the mid-1980s, when he was slowly emerging from a period of critical neglect in an age when composers tended to write music to impress their peers, rather than for a wider audience. The standing of classical music in this country suffered accordingly, and is still suffering.
Further evidence of Lloyd’s posthumous recognition is a new initiative by Lyrita, which is releasing a massive collection of his works on CDs. Lyrita was an early pioneer of Lloyd, issuing in the early 1980s three vinyl discs of his Fourth, Fifth and Eighth symphonies. Those recordings came after two events that ended his exile of more than 20 years growing mushrooms and carnations on a Dorset smallholding. First, John Ogdon, the pianist, who admired Lloyd’s writing for his instrument, showed the BBC (which had blacklisted him for being insufficiently atonal) the score of his Eighth Symphony, and it was eventually broadcast; and then in 1981, two of his symphonies were performed and broadcast – the Fourth, which had its premiere at the Cheltenham Festival in July, and then within weeks the Sixth was heard at the Proms.
The Lyrita initiative in part repackages earlier projects. Two boxed sets of Lloyd’s symphonies feature recordings conducted by the composer with the BBC Philharmonic and the Albany Symphony Orchestra. Another set includes choral works, also conducted by the composer: his Symphonic Mass of 1992, with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra and the Brighton Festival Chorus; and A Litany, with the Philharmonia and the Guildford Choral Society. Lloyd wrote choral music with a fluency, tunefulness and majesty familiar from his symphonies, and which had not been heard in the English canon since the deaths of Vaughan Williams and Howells – though his music is more susceptible to European influences from the romantic era than either of theirs. Another disc, made posthumously and conducted by Matthew Owens with the Exon Singers, includes his Requiem. Its score was only finished a month before the composer’s death in 1998, and was written in memory of Diana, Princess of Wales.
However, the great revelation of this Lyrita issue is the double CD set of his four piano concertos, written during his Dorset exile in the 1960s and early 1970s. “I just write what I have to write,” Lloyd said, and there is a sense in these concertos that some sort of liberation from past struggles – whether with his mental health or with the BBC – opens up a new ease of expression. The first of the concertos is perhaps the most stunning, reminiscent of the grandeur, power and musicality of the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Symphonies. It is subtitled Scapegoat, and was inspired by Lloyd’s hearing the dramatic playing of Ogdon, which he thought would be highly suited to what he had in mind. The work, written in the arctic winter of 1962-63, radiates nothing but warmth, not least because the composer’s writing for orchestra makes no concessions to the piano, and fills the listener’s head with the most astonishing range of sounds. That European influence is detectable again, with touches of Rachmaninov and Richard Strauss, but fundamentally the work is pure Lloyd, written to bewitch by a sheer beauty with which the musical world had little truck when the composer wrote it. It is, unquestionably, one of the great British piano concertos.
It is played on the new disc by Martin Roscoe, who gives an equally assured performance of the Second concerto. The Third and Fourth are performed sensitively by Kathryn Stott, who gave the first performance of the latter in an exuberant Festival Hall concert in 1984. All these recordings are essential for any lover of fine classical music: and if this project propels George Lloyd’s reputation up even further, then justice will have been done.
This great composer was blacklisted by the BBC for writing tunes – he demands our respect
Shunned by the establishment, George Lloyd spent decades in exile, growing mushrooms and carnations in Dorset