This is the third piano concerto by Alan Rawsthorne, a member of the rich generation of British composers born in the years between 1900 and World War I. The prior pair of concertos are both works for a single soloist. This duo concerto was written for the newly emerged and brilliant British pianist John Ogdon (who, like Rawsthorne, was a graduate of the Royal Northern College of Music and had the same piano teacher as Rawsthorne) and Ogdon's wife, the equally talented Brenda Lucas. The work was written for the famous BBC Henry Wood Promenade Concerts held at Royal Albert Hall in the tumultuous summer of 1968. John Pritchard conducted the London Philharmonic Orchestra.

The concerto is an economically written work. It is only about 18 minutes long, partly due to an abbreviated second movement. Its mood seems to partake of the uncertainty and chaos of the time of its creation. Early on in his career Rawsthorne had adapted a manner of using all the chromatic notes of the scale by sliding momentarily into one of a pair of nearby keys. Later, he would combine keys to create a bitonal effect and a sense of heightened emotional turmoil. But that was at the beginning of a period of time when atonal, serial music was coming to dominate the music scene worldwide. While Rawsthorne did not embrace atonality, he now mixed chromatic and diatonic notes much more readily, creating a darker, tonally less secure sound and increasing the sense of anguish that sometimes occurs in his music.

This quality is dominant in the first movement, a seven-minute Allegro di bravura. Although the writing for the two pianos is strong and brilliant, the mood is repressed and gray. Rawsthorne avoids cluttering the sound by letting the two pianos mostly prevail, with the orchestra often accompanying them lightly. The few moments when the orchestra's full force joins the piano are, therefore, exceptionally effective.

The second and third movements are played without pause. The slow movement (Adagio ma non troppo) begins in a quiet and mysterious mood, but quickly becomes a cry from the heart. Tonality is very vague in this piece, but piano sound is near the surface, whether the writing is for the two pianos alone or for the dramatic interjections of the orchestra. The finale is a theme and variations, beginning with a gentle statement of the main theme on clarinet. It is the change of mood, with the clarinet entrance lightening the emotions after the second movement ends on a sustained, sad chord, that more than any change in tempo signals the beginning of the new movement. The variations themselves are planned to create contrast more than continuity. Fast sections succeed slow ones, and vice versa. It is the movement's tendency to jump from one mood to another that creates its unsettling character. After appearing ready to fade out, the music suddenly leaps to a noisy conclusion.

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