His other work includes a jazz influenced Piano Concerto (1931), major ballet scores such as Horoscope (1937) and a full-scale choral masque Summer's Last Will and Testament (1936) that some consider his masterpiece.

[2] To Keynes, Lambert was perhaps the most brilliant man he had ever met; to de Valois he was the greatest ballet conductor and advisor his country had ever had; to the composer Denis ApIvor he was the most entertaining personality of the musical world.

In September 1922 Lambert entered the Royal College of Music, where his teachers were Ralph Vaughan Williams, R. O. Morris and Sir George Dyson (composition), Malcolm Sargent (conducting) and Herbert Fryer (piano).

For a few years he enjoyed celebrity, through the broader success of his next ballet (the neo-classical Pomona of 1927, choreographed again by Nijinska), and through his participation as narrator in many public performances (and a recording) of William Walton and Edith Sitwell's controversial Façade.

The Rio Grande (1927), for piano and alto soloists, chorus, and orchestra of brass, strings and percussion, sets a poem by Sacheverell Sitwell.

He was ruled unfit for active service in the armed forces; decades of hard drinking had impaired his health, which declined further with the development of diabetes that remained undiagnosed and untreated until very late in his life.

Lambert himself considered he had failed as a composer, and completed only two major works after the disappointment of Summer's Last Will and Testament - they were the ballet scores Horoscope (1938) and Tiresias (1951) - though there were also several smaller works, such as the white-note piano four hands suite Trois pièces nègres pour les touches blanches, written for the identical twin piano duo Mary and Geraldine Peppin.

[1] An expert on painting, sculpture, and literature as well as music,[14] Lambert differed from most of his fellow English composers of the time in his perception of the importance of jazz.

For the first performance of his Piano Concerto (1931), rather than select a British-born pianist, Lambert chose the Sydney-born, Brisbane-trained Arthur Benjamin to play the solo part.

[20] Lambert died on 21 August 1951, two days short of his forty-sixth birthday, of pneumonia and undiagnosed diabetes complicated by acute alcoholism, and was buried in Brompton Cemetery, London.