Following hard on the heels of Andrew Davis’s BBC SO Job for Teldec (see above) comes a super-budget rival from the increasingly prolific partnership of David Lloyd-Jones and the English Northern Philharmonia. Let me say straight away that, as an interpretation, I find Lloyd-Jones’s Job a generally more convincing and idiomatically lucid affair than Davis’s. Not only is the orchestral playing highly responsive (if not, in all truthfulness, as subtly blended as that of the LPO for Handley or the BBC SO for Davis), the sound is brilliant and thrillingly wide-ranging to match – only some occasionally close balancing for harps and percussion caused any slight worries.
Perhaps Lloyd-Jones’s formidable theatrical experience helps – he does have a knack of bringing out this score’s echoes of other dance masterpieces of this century (the start of “Spring Rounds” from The Rite of Spring at 1'41'' in scene 3; Daphnis et Chloe throughout scene 5). Scene 4’s “Dance of Plague, Pestilence, Famine and Battle”, too, possesses genuine balletic flair as well as proper menace. “Satan’s Dance of Triumph” is fine on the whole: listen out for the first and second trombones’ snarling low pedal A at 2'41'' (a detail not often brought out); a pity, however, about the misplaced cymbal clash at 0'15'' (one crotchet earlier than marked in the score). There’s a really excellent saxophone contribution in the “Dance of Job’s Comforters”, and the lusty “Galliard of the Sons of the Morning” has an infectious spring in its step. Personally I prefer the “Sarabande of the Sons of God” to move on just a touch more than it does here, and Lloyd-Jones rather breezes through the cataclysmic upheavals of scene 6 (where the organ employed sounds rather tinny). Nor, in the soothing “Epilogue”, does Lloyd-Jones quite attain the visionary heights of Boult or Handley.
First-timers to VW’s masterpiece should continue to gravitate towards Handley’s superb 1983 recording (quite remarkable value on a budget-price Classics for Pleasure CD), but Lloyd-Jones also knows his way round this score and remains well worth trying. The coupling is a nicely shaped, highly atmospheric account of The lark ascending, with David Greed a heartfelt soloist.'