Clive Lythgoe, who died September 4 at 79, was a top British classical pianist who specialized in American repertoire and was hailed as “Britain’s answer to Liberace.”

A protégé of Dame Myra Hess who was once her onstage page-turner, he performed with the leading British orchestras of the 1950s and 1960s, under the batons of such knights of the podium as Sir Adrian Boult, Sir John Barbirolli, and Sir Colin Davis, a childhood friend from Wimbledon. In 1967, his recording of George Gershwin tunes made the British top 10 alongside the Rolling Stones and garnered an Audio Record Review award.

He hosted a classical music television show, “The Lythgoe Touch.” He owned a six-bedroom country house in Surrey and a hand-built Bristol 405, which he said offered “a symphony of speed.” A devotee of modish Carnaby Steet, Lythgoe reputedly was the first concert pianist to perform in a polo shirt. In the early 1960s, he sported a Pierre Cardin suit that was said to have inspired Brian Epstein to clothe the Beatles in similar collarless outfits.

Things, it seemed, could hardly be better. But appearances often lie.

“The glory days were hell,” Lythgoe told the New York Times in 2001. He was so nervous about his New York debut in 1973 at Town Hall that he needed “two days of Valium until I could look at the reviews,” he said. “I don’t even remember playing.”

In 1976, he abandoned most performance and moved to Cleveland to become director of a children’s school offering lessons and music therapy to the underprivileged. Ten years later, he moved to New York and spent the last two decades of his life directing a charity that brought classical music performances to AIDS hospices, homeless shelters, retirement homes, and schools in low-income neighborhoods.

Lythgoe grew up in the London suburbs and first made music as a boy soprano in a church choir. He said he became interested in piano at age 7 while watching a Carmen Miranda film and soon began lessons with a local church organist.

During the London Blitz, Lythgoe’s family was made homeless when a bomb landed in the garden behind his house. Knocked out, he awoke to find his mother covered in red goo that turned out to be strawberry jam. Less lucky were his music teacher, who happened to be walking by at that moment and lost an arm, and a little girl – “my first girlfriend,” he once called her – who lived next door and was decapitated; decades later, Lythgoe complained that he woke up screaming. “I will never forget her,” he once told an audience in a 42nd Street residence for the homeless and disabled. “I escaped into music.”

After winning scholarships to study at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, he made his debut at the 1954 BBC Promenade Concerts at London’s Royal Albert Hall, broadcast live on the BBC. He played the piano concerto of Sir Arthur Bliss, Master of the Queen’s Musick, accompanied by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and conducted by Sir Arthur himself.

Lythgoe embarked on an ambitious career that eventually included hosting television and radio series. He was known for giving premieres of piano compositions by modern composers, including his friend Benjamin Britten. After rescuing a trove of old manuscripts from a music library, he became a somewhat unlikely champion of the romantic American composer Edward MacDowell.

“He is a better composer than Grieg,” Lythgoe told the Times in 1973, shortly before performing an all-MacDowell program at Town Hall for his New York debut. Although Lythgoe claimed to have blacked out all memory of the recital, the Times’s review was rapturous: “these sensitive performances got right to the heart of the music.”

Reviews were great again on his next trip to New York, in 1976, when Lythgoe performed back-to-back recitals in a single evening of Charles Ives, MacDowell, and Gershwin. “Mr. Lythgoe has the strength of 10,” the Times reviewer wrote.

But the ox was not so mighty. On the advice of his friend Leonard Bernstein to “take care of your inner soul,” Lythgoe made arrangements to become dean of the Cleveland Music School Settlement. In Cleveland, he seemed to find new strength running the school. In his spare time, he trucked his piano around the city to play for factory workers. He occasionally performed with the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of his old friend, Sir Colin.

In 1989, Lythgoe moved to New York to become director of the Roosa School of Music in Brooklyn and music director of Horizon Concerts, which then staged concerts for the elderly confined to nursing homes. He expanded its mission greatly, to include all sorts of people for whom classical music is not readily available. He described himself to friends as “a geriatric Robin Hood.”

Long gone were the flashy lifestyle and high-flying career. Lythgoe lived in a one-bedroom apartment in Jackson Heights and drove an old Lincoln, but he was happy.

“I suppose I am a kind of musical evangelist, God forbid, but I believe that is what music is for,” he told the “Today” show in 2001. “What I’m doing now is the happiest work I’ve ever done in my life. I’ve found what I was about.”

Clive Lythgoe

Born April 9, 1927, in Colchester, England; died September 4 of liver cancer; there are no known survivors.