A pupil of Charles Wood at Cambridge, Christian Darnton went on to study the bassoon and conducting at the Royal College of Music in London, and composition with Max Butting in Berlin. He won some early success as a composer, but his conversion to Communism and the consequent simplification of his style of writing was less well received, leading to some twenty years during which he wrote nothing. He resumed composing during the last ten years of his life, a period that brought a Fourth Symphony and a Concerto for Orchestra. His Concertino for piano and orchestra, for the South African pianist Adolf Hallis, was written in 1948.
