Toccata from Symphonie Concertante

William Lovelock (13 March 1899 – 26 June 1986) was an English classical composer and pedagogue who spent many years in Australia. He was the first Director of the Queensland Conservatorium of Music in Brisbane, and later became the chief music critic for The Courier-Mail newspaper while developing an independent career as a composer.
He was educated at Emanuel School, Wandsworth, and started piano lessons at the age of 6 and organ lessons at 12. At 16, he won an organ scholarship to the Trinity College of Music, where he studied with C. W. Pearce and Henry Geehl. After service as an artilleryman in World War I, he returned to Trinity College and graduated with a Bachelor of Music degree in 1922. He then joined the teaching staff and later obtained a doctorate in composition in 1932. As an organist, he served at St. Clements in Eastcheap from 1919 to 1923, then as Kapellmeister to Countess Cowdray from 1923 to 1926. He was also organist at the Church of the Good Shepherd in Carshalton from 1928 to 1930.

He served in the Indian Army Ordnance Corps during WW2 and reached the rank of major in 1942. While stationed in Varanasi in 1945 he sketched the beginning of a concerto for piano, the first of the many concertos to come.

On his return to London in 1946, Lovelock rejoined the faculty at Trinity College and eventually became Dean of the Faculty of Music at the University of London in 1954. In 1956, he was appointed as the first Director of the Queensland Conservatorium of Music in Brisbane, Australia, but left in 1959, then supporting himself as a free-lance teacher, adjudicator, and as chief music critic for The Courier-Mail in Brisbane.

Lovelock's music is unabashedly romantic, and this is the penultimate movement of his Symphonie Concertante for Organ and Orchestra, a solo Toccata (which serves as an extended cadenza), which is followed by a Fugue in which the orchestra rejoins for a final triumphant conclusion.