Lloyd: Eventide for Two Pianos

Eventide, for two pianos (1989) contains a tune that dates back to the composer's childhood. When Lloyd was writing the music for his opera John Socman (1951), his father William Lloyd, who was writing the libretto, produced a little carol which the ten-year-old George had penned and subsequently forgotten. William Lloyd had kept the manuscript and now presented it with the suggestion that it would be suitable for the opera at various junctures. Thus, the tune appears first as a carol sung by an old man and is later performed by a chorus of boys outside a window. Lloyd used the tune in this piece Eventide, for two pianos (1989) and finally arranged it for brass band as Evening Song in 1991. In it's two-piano incarnation recorded here, Lloyd exploits the extreme registers of the keyboards, the figurations in the upper reaches having the chiming brilliance of a carillon. The central climax is especially stark and ferocious, so that the return of the poignant simple tune, expertly deferred by the composer, has a genuinely cathartic effect.