George Lloyd
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.3 • 14.3K Ratings
🗓️ 23 April 1995
⏱️ 38 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The castaway choosing his eight desert island discs this week will also be relating a story of early triumph, 25 years of obscurity and a revival of fortunes at the age of 81 which has made him one of the country's most successful classical composers. He is George Lloyd, and he'll be talking to Sue Lawley about the shell-shock and bad luck which put paid to his early promise - his years growing carnations and mushrooms - and then, thanks to the late John Ogdon's intervention, his re-emergence to a rapturous reception by both the public and the musical establishment.
He'll also be describing the unexpected places where his music has been enjoying an airing - could it really be true that his symphonies are now to be heard in discos and pubs?
[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]
Favourite track: Jesu Joy Of Man's Desiring by Johann Sebastian Bach Book: Piers Plowman (In Middle English) by William Langland Luxury: Romney's portrait of Lady Hamilton
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello I'm Kirstie Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. |
| 0:05.0 | For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music. |
| 0:08.0 | The program was originally broadcast in 1995, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My costaway this week is a composer early in his life he enjoyed huge success. His first opera received |
| 0:35.8 | rapturous acclaim in London when he was only 21. Illness and misfortune followed. His |
| 0:41.6 | music fell out of favour and he retired to dorset and grew mushrooms. |
| 0:46.7 | But the musical establishment rediscovered him. |
| 0:49.2 | Today at the age of 81, he's one of this country's most successful composers. His latest work as |
| 0:54.8 | symphonic mass was received at its premiere with what one newspaper called |
| 0:58.9 | monster-raving loony ecstasy. He is George Lloyd. So despite a quarter of a century in the |
| 1:07.2 | musical wilderness your work is now published, it's recorded, it's being |
| 1:11.9 | performed to sell out audiences, what's it like to be successful again? |
| 1:16.0 | It's really a wonderful way to spend one's latter days. |
| 1:21.0 | I sometimes think of people I've known for instance when I when I was just |
| 1:24.4 | starting I met Sewell Scott and he had been very very famous in the early part of |
| 1:29.6 | the century people compared him to Debussy but by the time I knew him he was absolutely |
| 1:35.1 | thrown away. Nobody would look at him and he died in an obscurity and I |
| 1:40.0 | often thought myself how lucky I am that I'm writing and full of life and now people |
| 1:46.4 | want to listen to my music. |
| 1:48.4 | But does that kind of success go to your head or have you been snubbed? No, I think at my age one has seen too much disasters of one sort of another. |
| 1:59.0 | No, it doesn't go to my head. |
| 2:00.0 | At least I hope it doesn't. |
| 2:02.0 | Apparently snatches of your music have played in pubs and discos these times. |
... |
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