David Lloyd-Jones was one of the most prominent English conductors of his generation. He initially became associated with Russian operatic works not least because of his fluency in the Russian language. He led notable performances of Boris Godunov in 1971 at Covent Garden and gave the British premiere of
Prokofiev's War and Peace in 1972 at Sadler's Wells.
Lloyd-Jones gradually became identified with British orchestral music, however, often championing lesser-known composers in his lengthy discography. He recorded all the symphonies of
Alwyn and
Bax and has explored whole chunks of the orchestral outputs of
Bliss,
Holst, Rawsthorne, and others.
Lloyd-Jones has recorded for Hyperion and Naxos.
Lloyd-Jones was born in London on November 19, 1934. Musically, he was a late bloomer, not landing his first important post until 1959, and that as a Russian language coach at Covent Garden. This appointment was awarded largely because of earlier studies in Russian and German at Oxford University. His first advanced studies in music did not come until the mid-'50s when
Lloyd-Jones took private instruction with composer
Iain Hamilton.
In 1960
Lloyd-Jones served as an assistant to
John Pritchard at the
Royal Liverpool Philharmonic. He soon began to freelance as a conductor throughout England and also started making his own translations of Russian-language operas, presenting his own version of Boris Godunov at the Scottish Opera in 1967. Though he had become identified with the Russian repertory,
Lloyd-Jones was also doing other operatic works, including
Haydn's rarely heard La fedeltà premiata (1971).
Lloyd-Jones was instrumental in the founding of
Opera North (and its orchestra the
English Northern Philharmonia) in 1978, for which he served as musical director and later as artistic director, until 1990. During this period he oversaw the production of 50 operas, including
Krenek's Jonny spielt auf in 1984 (a British premiere) and
Prokofiev's The Love for Three Oranges (1989).
Throughout the 1980s and '90s, as well as in the new century,
Lloyd-Jones was also busy compiling a huge discography, mainly of British orchestral music. His
Bax symphony and orchestral works series for Naxos, running to eight discs, was completed in 2003 and had received consistently high praise. Among his later recordings wrer the 2006 CD of pianos concertos by Delius and John Ireland, with pianist
Piers Lane, part of Hyperion Records' Romantic Piano Concerto series. He was named honorary member of the Royal Philharmonic Society in 2007.
David Lloyd-Jones died on June 8, 2022 at the age of 87.