"One day you're in, and the next day you're out" is a popular saying in the fashion industry, a warning to designers to anticipate ever-evolving consumer tastes, but it could just as easily apply to composers of classical music. Such was the experience of English composer William Walton, who over the course of his six-decade career became intimately familiar with how the passage of time can ravage the demand for a composer's work.

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Walton was championed as the enfant terrible of English music in the decade following World War I — a largely self-taught composer who early on embraced with unbridled interest the cutting-edge sound of jazz. He achieved notoriety in 1923 for his cabaret-style collaboration with writer Edith Sitwell, Façade, followed by the premiere of his Viola Concerto, which showcased Walton's innovative approach to traditional classical forms. As Walton solidified his standing among London's cultural elite throughout the 1930s and '40s, he composed coronation marches for George VI and Elizabeth II, and, during World War II, contributed to the war effort by composing music for propaganda films.

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But by the mid-1950s, the pendulum of Walton's success swung in the opposite direction. His singular style was now criticized for being old hat, particularly by the European avant-garde who favored atonal modernism. Walton himself had seen the writing on the wall as early as 1939, when he said in a New York Times interview: "These days it is very sad for a composer to grow old. ... I seriously advise all sensitive composers to die at the age of 37. I've gone through the first halcyon period and am just about ripe for my critical damnation."

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While it's true Walton's renegade approach to composition had relaxed with age, his music still displayed the hallmarks of his younger self: a technicolor approach to orchestration, the influence of jazz and its propulsive rhythms, and his sorcerer-like ability to conjure any mood. Only now, he was fusing those elements with the melancholy harmonies and lush melodies of late 19th-century Romanticism, as we hear in his Cello Concerto.

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Premiered by the Ukraine-born Soviet cellist Gregor Piatigorsky in 1957, the Cello Concerto is the third and final of Walton's compositions for solo instrument and orchestra, a work fueled by two primary inspirations. First was Walton's blossoming friendship with Piatigorsky, a result of their close collaboration throughout the composition process. Walton later wrote the cellist to thank him for his "sympathetic guidance," concluding that, "It is to my mind the best of my three concertos."

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A change of scenery in 1955 proved the composer's second inspiration. Long obsessed with Italian culture and its laid-back way of life, Walton and his wife Susana made a permanent move to Foro d'Ischia, a picturesque volcanic island in the Gulf of Naples. Susana confessed to friends that she heard the Cello Concerto as a portrait of their marriage. Whether or not the composer agreed — he disliked narrative elements applied to his music — the concerto embodies a profound sense of romance and serenity, with flashes of Walton's fiery orchestration adding heat to the passion brewing under the music's shimmering surface.

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A mysterious gesture opens the work: a hypnotic ticking figure in the strings and woodwinds, over which the cello unspools a rhapsodic song of longing in its expressive upper register. Solo voices from the orchestra float in and out of the scene in quiet conversation with the cello, contributing to an ever-evolving kaleidoscope of colors that heightens the music's dreamscape atmosphere.

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The raucous dance of the central scherzo jolts our senses after the tranquility of the first movement, the cello caught in a maniacal game of perpetual motion as its rapid-fire figurations are blunted by the brawny military marches that dominate the scene. Moments of unrestrained lyricism delivered by the cello do little to tame the orchestral beast, forcing the soloist to scurry away with a final skittering scale.

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In the concerto's finale, a serpentine melody introduced by the cello over plucked strings becomes a launching pad for six wildly contrasting variations. Orchestra and cello together embark on an ethereal elaboration of the theme in the first variation, followed by a pair of agitated variations for unaccompanied cello that bookend a violent eruption of orchestral sound. The final two variations serve as an epilogue, returning us to the mood of the first movement's meditative melancholy.

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Haunted again by the obsessive tick-tock figure that opened the work, themes from the first and final movements intertwine as the music moves into shadowier realms. Expansive melodies become increasingly fragmented, voices from the orchestra depart the scene one by one, and the cello slowly descends into the instrument's gravelly depths, the final vibrations of its lowest string retreating into a serene silence.