George Lloyd: Seven Extracts from 'The Serf' for violin & piano [Printed Music]

24 page A4 saddle-stitched violin score & 54 page A4 wire-bound piano score

Duration: c. 28 minutes

A PDF Version of this score is available upon request.  Please contact publishing@wyastone.co.uk

A recording of this work is available on CD [SRCD424] or to Download and Stream

George Lloyd started to learn the violin at the age of five and he was a pupil of the violinist Albert Sammons for six years. In his youth, Lloyd’s talent as an instrumentalist allowed him to participate in local musical events from formal concerts to more convivial gatherings: a 1930 newspaper report of a ‘social in the Zennor schoolroom’ observed that ‘Mr George Lloyd played the violin and dancing was indulged in’. Looking back on his formative influences, Lloyd singled out Sammons as having the most lasting effect on his burgeoning creativity, identifying the latter’s ‘instinctive, freely expressive playing’ as having a direct bearing on the kind of music he began to write. In this regard, Lloyd’s description of the sound of Sammons’s playing as ‘gorgeous’, with ‘a lyrical quality’ in which ‘every note seemed to sing’ chimes with the composer’s own essentially lyrical approach to musical lines and phrases.

The first instrumental work featuring his own instrument which became part of his official catalogue is the Seven Extracts from ‘The Serf’ for violin and piano (1974). Lloyd’s most comprehensive reworking of material from The Serf is undoubtedly the two orchestral suites he wrote in 1997, 23 yet more than two decades before these late large-scale pieces, the composer had produced a more modestly conceived arrangement of music from the opera, the Seven Extracts from ‘The Serf’, for violin and piano (1974).