In the last two years of his life, French composer Olivier Messiaen devoted most of his energies to the creation of his final large-scale work for orchestra, Éclairs sur l'au delá. Somewhere along the line, Messiaen received a commission from oboist Heinz Holliger for a new work, and Messiaen began to comply with this request even as Éclairs sur l'au delá was still in progress. When death came to Messiaen on April 27, 1992, Éclairs sur l'au delá was as yet unperformed, but the score was complete. In the case of the Holliger commission, by now titled Concert à quatre, Messiaen had produced four movements, of which the first and third movements were complete, but the second and fourth remained only in sketch form.

The second movement, it turned out, was an arrangement of an already existing piece, the Vocalise-étude originally composed in 1939 for voice and piano. Messiaen's widow, pianist Yvonne Loriod, fleshed out the sketches for the fourth movement Rondeau adding some of Messiaen's characteristic birdcalls for good measure. Composer George Benjamin, a former student of Messiaen, completed the orchestration with some advice from Holliger. It is called Concert à quatre as there are actually four soloists involved in the concerto, namely oboe (played originally by Holliger), cello (premiered by Mstislav Rostropovich), flute (played by Catherine Cantin), and piano (Loriod). One of the most striking things about the Concert à quatre is the fact that it embraces tonality with such enthusiasm—the "Vocalise" movement hearkens back to the world of the French Impressionists. While the Concert à quatre has its moments of explosiveness and violence, the overall feeling of the work is relaxed, as though Messiaen laid his pen aside after a day, and a life's work, done well, drifting off into a daydream from which, sadly, he was never to wake up.

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