Jonathan Lloyd

Jonathan Lloyd is now recognised as one of the leading British composers of his generation. His earliest success was with Cantique for orchestra, written during his student days at the Royal College of Music and included in the SPNM's 30 Year Retrospective in 1973; that same year he went on a fellowship to Tanglewood where his Scattered Ruins won the Koussevitsky Prize.

The BBC premiere of Toward the Whitening Dawn in 1981 brought wider recognition and led to a series of performances and commissions from the London Sinfonietta including a Viola Concerto and Waiting for Gozo and in 1984 a Mass, sung frequently both abroad and in the UK, including on a Contemporary Music Network Tour by the London Sinfonietta Voices.

The next decade saw performances of Lloyd's instrumental and vocal works at major festivals - the Proms, Aldeburgh, Huddersfield, Donaueschingen, Brighton, Montepulciano - as well as the composition of five symphonies of different dimensions: Symphony No.1 was premiered by Simon Rattle and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Symphony No.4 was written for the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and the ensemble-sized Symphony No.5 was commissioned by the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group. Tolerance, effectively a concerto for orchestra, was premiered by the London Philharmonic under Franz Welser-Möst in 1994. Recordings of Symphony No.2 and Mass can be heard on a Largo CD, and Symphony No.4 was recently issued on the NMC label.

Lloyd’s works have included a new score for Hitchcock's silent classic Blackmail which has been toured in Europe and the USA, performed with screenings of a new print of the film. A Violin Concerto written for Austrian violinist Ernst Kovacic, commissioned by the Aldeburgh Foundation, was given its first performance in 1995 by the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Martyn Brabbins, and was heard again at the ISCM World Music Days in Manchester in 1998. Lloyd’s And Beyond, written as a sequel to Toward the Whitening Dawn was premiered in 1998 to celebrate the London Sinfonietta’s 30th anniversary and the composer’s 50th birthday year.

Jonathan Lloyd is published by Boosey & Hawkes

March 2001