The effort of writing his Seventh Symphony, with its predominantly tragic tone, at the end of the 1950s had taken a heavy toll on the composer’s mental health and by the start of the following decade he was in a very negative frame of mind. Not for the first time in his life, the act of composing provided the key to alleviating the situation, as he explained: ‘… around the very early sixties, a few darker thoughts – tragic thoughts – began haunting me. With them musical ideas began to formulate and I began to wonder if this might be the time for that piano concerto’.

If the first three piano concertos have the heft and communicative power of Lloyd’s larger middle-period symphonies, the Fourth has a close affinity to the Ninth Symphony, which was completed the previous year. Both pieces exhibit an impish sense of fun, tempered by profound feelings of yearning and regret. George Lloyd approached the piano concerto form with imagination and individuality. His idiomatic solo writing avoids shallow virtuosity and empty rhetoric and there are no mighty tussles between piano and orchestral forces encountered in archetypal large-scale concertante scores. Instead, the composer offers a series of deeply personal attempts to reconcile timehonoured elements of display with symphonic preoccupations of long-range tonality, rhythmic energy and melodic growth. In sum, Lloyd’s four piano concertos constitute a compelling and distinctive branch of his creative legacy.