The decade and a half after the end of the Second World War saw Rubbra increasingly regarded as one of Britain's major composers, not short of commissions and much performed. His generation was sometimes taken aback by the sudden post-war ‘anointing’ of Benjamin Britten as The Great New National Composer. Gerald Finzi felt strongly about that, and according to his first biographer Stephen Banfield someone who felt even more strongly was Rubbra, since at the time he found Britten's music lacking in ‘inner core’; when Billy Budd's première was broadcast, he rang Finzi in an interval, ‘totally exasperated’. They had not been among the young Britons favoured at pre-war festivals of the International Society for Contemporary Music, where Arthur Bliss, during his enfant terrible period, aroused interest, as did the prodigy Walton, with his String Quartet (soon repudiated!) at the very first series of concerts in Salzburg in 1923, and later his youthful masterpieces, the overture Portsmouth Point (Zurich, 1926) and the Viola Concerto (Liège, 1930). Neither Rubbra nor Finzi even met the Society's guiding spirit, Professor Edward Dent, until after the Second World War; the curious Dante quotation Rubbra appended at the start of his 1955–6 Piano Concerto (see p. 136) hints at a preoccupation with ‘opportunism’ in some shape or form. But at the time it was all relative, something to grouse about when not better occupied, and the energy and vitality sensed in Rubbra's music from the late 1940s and early 1950s were charmingly reflected in an account by Arthur Hutchings, dedicatee of the Third Symphony, of the ‘arrival’ at Durham University of the 1949 recorder piece Meditazioni sopra ‘Cœurs désolés’.