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It’s good to see some support for George Lloyd in the reviews and on the Message Board. He seems to me to be a very fine composer and his continued neglect in live performance completely inexplicable as his best music has all that’s necessary to make him a popular favourite. Or is that perhaps the problem? - tunes and loud, emphatic endings are no longer fashionable!
Lyrita chose well when they recorded Symphonies 4, 5 and 8, among the finest of the sequence, but No.7 is also a masterpiece if slower to reveal its secrets. And I’ve just been listening to the much slighter No.6: the slow movement is surely one of the loveliest things in English music – why hasn’t Classic FM picked it up?
It’s little short of scandalous that this is the only Lloyd symphony to have been heard at the Proms and that ‘a last minute addition to the programme by Edward Downes after a commissioned composer failed to deliver a score on time. Lloyd used to point out the irony that his first and only Promenade concert happened by accident!’