George Lloyd: An African Shrine & Other Piano Pieces

During the summer of 1972 I wrote a number of piano pieces. On the title page of "The Road through Samarkand" I added, "...with burning hearts they danced their way from Calais to Calcutta, but what did they find?".  I had been watching the yellow-robed, shaven-headed, chanting, bell-ringers dancing up and down Oxford Street, London; this was at the time when Eastern cults and cheap drugs were persuading young experimenters to trek half-way round the world in the hope of finding new salvation. I pictured them dancing joyfully across Asia ever nearer their final disillusion....

The largest and most developed piece on this recording is "An African Shrine," written for John Ogdon in 1966. Violence and revolution in Africa were darkening everyone's hopes. I subtitled the piece as follows: scene: A lonely road. A deserted shrine. A woman kneels weeping. As the armies of the world pass by, she prays." George Lloyd