George Marshall asks: >Has anyone any views on his music? George Lloyd is one of those composers most people either love or hate. I like certain pieces better than others. The Fourth certainly is one of his stronger pieces. I find him very similar to Tchaikovsky (another uneven composer) in his symphonic approach. His Symphonic Mass, however, bores me. I used to like him a lot better than I do now, but Andrew Porter convinced me that at least some of the time (and at structurally important moments) he takes the cheap way out. While I think him a good composer, I find others of his generation and conservative mindset -- Alwyn, Rubbra, Stevens, Frankel, and Veale, for example -- much more interesting. Lloyd suffered a nervous breakdown after the failure of his opera John Socman. He didn't compose anything for years and years. That partially accounts for his neglect. Academia ignored him, but academia ignores a lot of people who still get played and plays a lot of music that otherwise gets ignored. So it's not really fair to blame the Pedants Who Hate True Beauty. However, the BBC, the prime disseminator of music in Britain, changed policy and decided to champion composers -- mostly of the "hard" wing of contemporary music -- who had previously been neglected. The conductor Edward Downes and recording companies like Lyrita and Albany are responsible for Lloyd's second shot, and obviously their work has borne fruit at the BBC. Steve Schwartz