George Lloyd - Symphonies Nos. 6 and 7 'Proserpine'

George LLOYD (1913-1998)

Symphony No.6*

Symphony No.7 'Proserpine'**

BBC Northern Symphony Orchestra

Edward Downes

BBC Studio Recordings

Broadcast 31 Deember 1980 (Premiere)*

Broadcast 5 September 1979 (Premier)**

Released 2017

In an article of 1990, Lewis Foreman described George Lloyd (1913-98) as 'Britten's forgotten contemporary'. It is true that the two composers were born in the same year, but Lloyd, thankfully, is nowhere near as forgotten as he used to be - thanks largely to the championing of his music by the conductor Edward Downes and the enterprising efforts of recording companies like Albany and Lyrita. Still, he remains all too rarely heard in the concert hall.

The great traumatic event of Lloyd's life, as is now commonly known, occurred in 1942 when, as part of an Arctic convoy his ship was struck by a torpedo. George was down in the transmitting station which rapidly became flooded with oil and was apparently the last man to escape with his life. The trauma of the experience, however, stifled any compositional activities for some time and left him ever afterwards in a fragile mental state. A blossoming career in music appeared to have been terminated, and he retired to Dorset to work as a market gardener. The creative spark, however, had not been entirely extinguished, and he eventually began to write again.

The Seventh Symphony was composed over a number of years and is considered by Paul Conway to be the work which really exorcises the demons of the composer's wartime experiences rather than the Fourth Symphony which he wrote in 1946 as soon as he felt able to compose again. The outer movements are substantial and dramatic and do sound redolent at times of the mayhem involved in his ordeal. The central Largo, by contrast, seems to exude an air of consolation. A further subtext to this symphony lies in its title 'Proserpine' which refers to Swinburne's poem 'The Garden of Proserpine', concerning that mythical divinity's role as goddess of death, extracts from which are quoted in the score. Death, indeed, was very much a preoccupation for Lloyd at the time, and he confided that he could not decide whether he has written the symphony because he wanted to die, or vice versa. Yet despite all the turmoil, Lloyd's flair for melody and lyricism is never long absent, and there are passages of great beauty, especially in the Largo. Yet it is the ferocity found in the outer movements (unusual for Lloyd) which will throb in the memory. Indeed, so much dynamic energy is expended during its fifty-minute span that it almost seems to run out of steam and subsides into a mysterious epilogue which fades away into silence.

In a sense, Lloyd's Sixth Symphony serves as a palate-cleansing sorbet between the more substantial courses provided by the monumental symphonies either side of it. The Sixth, by contrast, lasts barely twenty minutes, and is a predominantly buoyant, positive work in which most things are done in the light. Paul Conway well describes it as exuding a 'neo-classical elegance'. There are shadows in the beautiful slow movement, but these are not threatening, and the overall impression is, as the composer himself affirmed, 'bright and lively', and the ending is as far as it is possible to be from that of the Seventh Symphony.

On this recording the BBC Northern Symphony Orchestra (as was) is conducted by Lloyd's all-time champion, Edward Downes (who better?). The recording quality is of the highest order, as we have come to expect from Lyrita.

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