Steve Schwartz wrote:

>David Lloyd-Jones does well with Pomona, but Tiresias just slips through
>his fingers.  Individual sections come off well, but the account as a
>whole lacks a strong narrative pull.  I miss a sense of culmination,
>of the rhetorical watershed.  The ending should come off as a regretful
>commentary on the climax.  Too often, I get the sense that the music is
>merely played, rather than shaped.

Yes, this is my impression of Lloyd-Jones' "Tiresias." Too often recordings
of ballet music come off this way, as boiler-plate for a series of dimly
imagined tableaux.  Without the ballet itself in view on stage, perhaps it
is difficult for some conductors to muster a strong narrative pull.  For
example, I have yet to hear a recording of Beethoven's "Creatures of
Prometheus" (seldom choreographed) that involves me in any programmatical
way.  "Tiresias" deserves better as well.

I would not judge Lambert too harshly for his criticism of the "lack
of depth and the concentration on surface" of many modern composers on
the basis Lambert himself was no paradigm of what he preached.  One of
Lambert's main arguments in "Music Ho!" was against "craft for craft's
sake," and in his own music he shunned the aridity of craft for its own
sake and re-animated the old forms instead, moving in a direction towards,
in his words, "a new angle of vision rather than the exploitation of a new
vocabulary." If his genius as a composer failed to match his words as a
critic, music is the worse for it.

John Dalmas
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