Towards the end of his life composer Lloyd was sort of adopted by the Albany Symphony, which performed the American premieres of some of his symphonies and recorded them with the composer on the podium. The composer had had a checkered reception in the UK, partly due to the BBC feeling that his music was old-fashioned in its tonalism and didn’t conform to the international serial style that was de rigor at the time.
He had composed his First Symphony shortly after he turned 19, and the 12th was his final symphony before his passing in 1998.
Both are one-movement works of generally diatonic tonality and exhibiting a gift for the lyric line. The First uses a variation form extensively and ends with a fugal passage. The 12th is clearly a more mature and sophisticated work, which flows more smoothly from one section to another. There are two main themes and four variations, ending with the two longest sections of the work – an Adagio followed by an Allegro. The relaxed unfolding of the work gives the earlier symphony a nervous and rushed feeling in retrospect.
An interesting tech note on the SACD: The original recordings were made in l990 in the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall, engineered as two-channel by Tony Faulkner. The tapes were processed at the Zarex HD Studio in South Bend, Indiana, to upsample to DSD and to generate the 5.1 channel surround mix for the SACD. The surround upmix process combines data drawn from stereo phase relationships with other digital enhancements and is felt to equal many discrete multichannel recordings of concert music. (Opus 3 and F.I.M. are two labels which have also derived surround SACDs from two-channel original tapes.) I found the surround channels needed a boost in level to achieve a balanced hall ambient effect, but once that was done the impression was as good as many discrete SACDs.
– John Sunier
