Reviews of Judith Hall playing "blessed
days of blue"
by Jonathan Lloyd
"The fine flautist Judith Hall - for whom it
was written - was the soloist in the Lloyd piece, an extended work which
expoited the full gamut of the instrument's tonal and technical potential;
the flute playing was elegant, accomplished and assured, right from the
impressive opening cadenza to its wistful ending.
The orchestral score, too, was full of fascinatingly new sounds, the strings
being flavoured by the addition of harp, mandolin and guitar; the composer,
who was present, and who was called to the platform, must have been much
encouraged by the genuine warmth of the applause, both for his music and
for the excellence of Judith Hall's performance" THE
MALVERN GAZETTE
"The music of Jonathan Lloyd defies conventional
categories of complexity and simplicity; he is one of the few postmodernists
for whom musical logic and audible clarity go hand in hand. Like his symphonies,
his recent flute concerto, blessed days of blue, derives its abundance
of effect from an economy of gesture, and balances playful with serious
drama. The work is the third of four works composed for the flautist Judith
Hall, who gave a memorable world première with the English Symphony
Orchestra, who commissioned it, under the baton of William Boughton, on
20 April at Malvern Boys College.
The concerto, a single expansive movement of some 20 minutes, was inspired
by the memory of Lloyd's former teacher John Lambert and its title is
taken from a line by Samuel Beckett: 'On him will rain again as in the
blessed days of blue the passing cloud'. Certainly there is a sense of
programmatic imagery in the work's final section. Characteristic of Lloyd's
style is the almost leitmotivic pervasiveness of three terse gestures
which, if at first banal, appear in transformations which surprise and
delight, and articulate a larger dramatic shape. With its varied instrumentation,
which contrasts plucked strings (mandolin, guitar and harp) with a 23-piece
string orchestra, textures and colour, if at times sparse, are always
exotic and unusual. Constant shifts of timbral focus generate a volatile
aural perspective, in which moments of tension and epiphanic beauty emerge
and recede.
Initial crystalline octave patterns played by harp are enriched with the
solo flute's aura of mystique as it weaves microtonal melismas and sustained
note-bending, a cross-cultural echo underlined by percussive drumming
of mandolin and guitar marked 'quasi tabla'. The third motive, reminiscent
of a classical decorative turn, is introduced by mandolin and guitar,
delicately etched against harp octaves and the tabla rhythms in lower
strings. In the solo flute's lyrical expansion of the motives, the melisma
is transformed into an incisive darting gesture while strings thicken
and divide towards the first climax, and one of the most striking sonorities
of the work: a veiled cascade of dovetailed falling motives, a Purcellian
string-fantasia texture of Tippettian harmony. This slows to stasis, before
momentum brusquely resumes, towards a second galvanic climax. Here the
resolution is unexpected, and as the sun emerges from behind a cloud,
so does a delicate blues phrase in the guitar. Even if naive pictorialism
may be inferred from the blues, the 'raining' pizzicato scales in multiple
divided strings, and the 'blessed' solo flute sustained over the strings,
the effect is both witty and ravishing. Yet musical energy resumes in
the flute's virtuoso acceleration towards an emphatic climax, with tremolando
strings, by now 23 individual parts, from which the guitar 'blues' emerges
again, enhanced by the mandolin's' glissando thirds. The work's playful
expressivity is summed up: "in the final gesture, the flute's melisma
suspended in silence, a blues chord in the mandolin echoing wittily, poetically,
in the air." TEMPO