Though William Lloyd Webber, father of Andrew and Julian, was dedicated in his career as a church organist and teacher, he was, behind that facade, an arch-romantic. Even more than previous recordings of his music, the collection of ten short pieces on the Chandos disc brings that out very clearly, and both discs under consideration here, the Priory issue of organ pieces as well, consistently reveal how he wrote tunes quite as fluently as his son, Andrew.
Though one of the orchestral pieces, Lento, was written as early as 1939, most of this music, including all the organ pieces, dates from the decade following the Second World War. He then felt that he was out of touch with post-war developments and stopped writing until not long before his death in 1982, when without telling even his family – he began to compose again.
Throughout his composing career his style remained consistent, unashamedly eclectic, combining English pastoral elements with passages of surging passion using luscious harmonies after Rachmaninov. So the Serenade for Strings emerges as an integrated piece, even though the three movements were originally written at quite different times and for different combinations – the opening “Barcarolle” as a song in 1951, the central “Romance” – the emotional core of the work – in 1980, and the final “Elegy” in 1960, originally a horn study for Andrew to play as a student.
Most of the pieces are in ternary form, A-B-A, and make their points simply and effectively, but the tone-poem, Aurora, is altogether more ambitious, a piece earlier recorded by Lorin Maazel as a coupling for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Variations for cello and orchestra (Philips, 3/87 – nla). The hushed opening reminds me of the start of Bartok’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, only anglicized with a touch of Vaughan Williams. It then quickly develops in a colourful sequence of episodes, beautifully orchestrated, and here receives an ideally warm, aptly sensuous performance under Hickox.
Predictably, the soloists are excellent – Tasmin Little in the sweetly lyrical Benedictus, Julian Lloyd Webber and Skaila Kanga in the exotic Nocturne, not to mention the schoolgirl, Hollie Cook, soloist with the Arts Educational School Choir in the final item, Jesus, dear Jesus, a simple anthem written for the school where the composer’s wife taught. Like Benjamin Britten’s Missa brevis of a few years earlier, Lloyd Webber’s Princeps pacis Mass was written for the Choir of Westminster Cathedral, very much on the same scale but in a more conventional Anglican style, fresh and open.
The disc of organ music is much more a specialist issue, one to welcome as the first recording on the refurbished Willis organ at Salisbury Cathedral, with Jane Watts exploiting the full range of the instrument. Roughly half the 22 pieces here are typical examples of hushed and meditative organ music intended to fill in discreetly between items in a service, with five more designed as bright and energetic voluntaries for speeding congregations out of church, all of them blowing cobwebs away in brassy registration. There are few more pretensions in the writing than that, but the point to note is how consistently Lloyd Webber is not just lyrical in his writing but tuneful, with melodies staying in the mind, not just meandering.
There are Franckian echoes in the chromaticism of the Chorale, Cantilena and Fugue, but generally the style is very similar to that of the orchestral pieces. The note reproduces a fascinating cutting from The Radio Times of January 1929, when the 14-year-old Lloyd Webber as a prodigy gave a BBC broadcast recital from the church of St Mary-le-Bow. As usual with Priory issues, a full specification of the organ is given.'