https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/news/ronald-stevenson-composer-best-known-for-passacaglia-on-dsch-thought-to-be-the-longest-onemovement-piano-piece-10144581.html
Certainly a unique figure. I knew him well and heard him play on a great many occasions, and he never sounded like anyone else. His compositions are a major legacy which still awaits full appreciation, though a growing number of performances and recordings is helping.
Correct in every particular! - and Martin Anderson's piece in the
Independent, to which you link here, stands head and shoulders above all other such published tributes.
Stevenson is thought of principally as a piano composer and, given such extraordinary works as
Symphonic Elegy for Liszt,
Motus Perpetuus? Temporibus Fatalibus and, of course, his best known, most monumental and yet most widely performed/recorded, the
Passacaglia on DSCH (not to mention his two concertos for the instrument), that's perfectly understandable, but one of his greatest legacies is his songs and song-cycles for voice and piano that mark him out as one of the greatst British song composers of any era.
Here, haphazardly assembled in the current sad circumstances, are a few personal memories and thoughts about Ronald Stevenson.
Dimly aware of his name only, I first heard him by chance when switching on the radio during a performance of a work for tenor and piano that I’d never previously heard (which fact turned out to be unsurprising as I later discovered that this was its broadcast première). I recognised the voice of Peter Pears immediately but was also struck that, whoever the pianist might be, he was light years beyond Benjamin Britten (fine as he was). I could not put my finger on the identity of the composer either. At the end, the announcement revealed that I had been listening to (most of) a song cycle
Border Boyhood by Ronald Stevenson and that the truly outstanding pianist in the performance had been the composer himself. I was wholly enthralled. I seem to recall having written to Ronald soon afterwards but appear not to have kept a copy, so I cannot now recall the precise details. I later enthused about this to my long-suffering piano teacher at Royal College of Music who, with a knowing look and obvious enthusiasm, replied "ah, so you’ve heard Ronald Stevenson! If you didn’t know great piano playing before, you have no excuse for not doing so now!", adding the pointedly admonitory remark "even he has to practise, you know!..."
In 1973, he wrote to invite me to attend his performance of his Passacaglia at London’s Wigmore Hall, to which sadly I could not go.
Almost five years later, he played it again in Edinburgh and, on a return trip from northern Norway, I stopped off to attend this. Playing on a very hot August evening in his shirtsleeves, the music was so engaging and its performance so compelling from first note to last that you could have heard a pin while it was dropping; an eminently well-deserved standing ovation greeted it when it was over. I had arranged to stay overnight with him and his wife Marjorie before resuming my journey south but, in the end, I remained there for some five days, during which musicians and other friends came and went with such frequency that their home, Townfoot House in the Pentland village of West Linton (where they had lived since the mid-1950s) seemed almost to have assumed the character of a train station (
Arrival Platform Humlet, perhaps?!). Ronald frequently referred to his music room as his "Den of Musiquity"; in reality, however, it was much more than that - a vibrant hub of animated and enthused conversations on every subject under the sun, including music, where Ronald, usually in his rightful place on the piano stool, turned each visit to it into what one brilliant commentator appositely described as "a high intensity one man arts festival". This was to be the first of many trips to the Hoose a' the Foot o' the Toon; all were immensely and intensely rewarding.
On one of these, during a long (no, for him, short!) walk in the hills near his home (in physical fitness terms, he could have given his friend Percy Grainger a run for his money!), we had been discussing the music of Nielsen; he quoted - as often he did - Nielsen’s assertion that "music is the sound of life", believing as he (Ronald) did that if ever it amounted to less than that there was no point in writing it. Frivolously (and taking something of a risk), I asked him whether, if music is the sound of life and (as we know) whisky is the water of life, does that make his music the sound of whisky? After a pregnant pause, we each answered, in unison, "DISCUSS!" and then fell about laughing together.
On one occasion, he was looking through my then recently completed fourth piano sonata with me. Originally been intended to be a big four movement piece, I’d decided to abandon this plan and leave its first movement as a standalone single movement work (pace Berg with his, though sadly not remotely on the same level!). He pointed to one part of it and said "this passage would benefit from simplification", whereupon I was invited to go read something in the next room while he worked on that simplification. On returning to the den of musiquity almost half an hour later, I expected that he would have pared down the texture; instead, he had simplified it by
adding notes to it, including some doubling - and it did indeed simplify it by clarifying what I'd wanted to do but which I’d not written as well as I could have done. He also added "look at the first page - chromaticism, yes, but all is clearly centred around E minor - so why have you cluttered up your score with all those unnecessary b****y naturals?! - are you ashamed of writing tonally? - there’s no law against it, you know!", proving the obvious point that, as every symbol on the page has to be read by the performer, the composer should make the text as clear as possible and write as few of them as possible.
Following another such visit, I was due to catch a sleeper train from Edinburgh to Bristol and, before I did so, Ronald and I sat for some time in a bar on Waverley station discussing our respective violin concertos, he having just completed his 50+ minute one to a commission from Menuhin and I having almost finished my own much more modest sized single movement one. He generously gave me a number of very useful practical pointers about the harp writing in mine, all of which taught me things that I should already have known. He was curious that mine introduced a solo soprano almost a third of the way through and that it becomes a double concerto thereafter; on its title page, I had quoted Ronald on his own concerto:
"I have put into it everything I know and love about this angel-instrument"
I added, in the spirit of the question and answer attributed to Chopin from his days in Valldemosa:
"What can be better than the sound of the guitar? The sound of two guitars!"
and then
"And what better than an angel-instrument? Why, TWO such, of course!"
Ronald observed that mine must be the only violin concerto written for and dedicated to Jane Manning...
I think that he was fascinated that, although utterly useless in front of a piano, I had nevertheless become so obsessed with writing for it and wanting to try against very considerable odds to make the most of that. This might have been my downfall and it certainly felt rather like it when, some years later, he encouraged me, against my will and better judgement, to play his friend Lawrence Glover's 2-piano arrangement of Busoni's
Tanzwalzer with him; it was already a sufficiently daunting prospect to do this with one of the finest pianists I'd ever encountered who was also one of the leading authorities on Busoni but, when I reluctantly sat down to try to do this and he told me that I was sitting on what had been Busoni's own piano stool, it was all that I could do to prevent myself from putting on some running shoes.
Returning to the malt of our Scotland - I remember him once in said den of musiquity in the no longer so wee sma' oors o' the marnin', having imbibed no small quantity of the amber nectar (as indeed had I), sitting at his piano and giving an impromptu performance of Chopin's G minor Ballade with immense panache (as well as some perfectly understandable wrong notes) and wondering how anyone could possibly have done such a thing at all! That piece has long since assumed a strange kind of significance for me; on a much earlier occasion, Benjamin Britten went to the piano during a conversation with me and he played it, again on a whim, having almost certainly not practised it in years - and I was quite astonished that it meant so much to him. Soon after that, I had a handful of lessons with Ronald's and my compatriot (and Ronald's almost exact contemporary) Thea Musgrave, who for some reason decided that I would do well to make a point of studying the music of Berg and Chopin - and she made her point by playing (again, surely without any immediately prior practice) the first few pages of this seminal work. Imagine how all this coalesced in my mind when, during John Ogdon's recording sessions for Sorabji's
Opus Clavicebalisticum, he happened to have in his battered suitcase his extensive essay on that very piece! On the strength of all of that, its position of considerable importance may well be understood...
Ronald often bemoaned most pianists' lack of recourse to the piano's
sostenuto (middle) pedal (he would in some instances actually write out pedalling scores beneath certain passages when practising, in order to set out how to deploy all three pedals the most effectively if the music called for this); he once described this as laziness and I recall replying that it seemed almost like eschewing middle C. He pointed out that the ideas for its invention had been credited to Liszt and that the earliest examples of it in manufacture already dated from decades ago. I remember a recital in the small Edinburgh Society of Musicians venue in which he included the very short and to the point Fantasiettina that Sorabji had written in honour of Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid's 70th birthday (which had fallen just three days short of the composer's own), during the course of which there was a noticeable thud from where he was playing. I was seated only just behind him and could tell that this had come from his having transferred his left foot from the
una corda pedal to the
sostenuto one but missed. I briefly sniggered, very quietly. Afterwards, he laughingly said "you heard me; I heard you!"...
Few knew and wrote as much about the composer as did the late and much missed Malcolm MacDonald, whose book
Ronald Stevenson: A Musical Biography (National Library of Scotland, 1989) is an invaluable source of information, as indeed is the symposium
Ronald Stevenson: The Man and his Music (Toccata Press, 2005), edited by Colin Scott-Sutherland who, like Malcolm, is also sadly no longer with us.
One particular example among the all too many under-represented Stevenson works which I hope will attract new exposure is his large-scale violin concerto which has to date received but a single performance and a pretty unsatisfactory one at that (I recall attending it more than two decades ago). Commissioned by and written for Menuhin in the 1970s with no deadline pressure, it was a long time in the making (rather like Dutilleux’s violin concerto
l'Arbre des songes, coincidentally written immediately after Ronald's). Whereas Ronald's took him almost three years, Dutilleux's occupied him for twice that length of time (and is but half the size of Ronald's!); however, whilst Dutilleux's received its première soon after its completion, Ronald's had to wait until 1992 when it was conducted rather than played by Menuhin who instead delegated the soloist's part to one of his students; it seems to have been poorly rehearsed and was somewhat haphazardly played by the otherwise fine but on this occasion almost certainly under-rehearsed BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and an unduly tentative violinist who could not always even be heard clearly (and nowhere in its score is the orchestra part overwritten, which is especially unsurprising since Ronald had been a violinist himself in his early days). It was a most frustrating experience, especially for someone who had been given at least a little opportunity to study the score beforehand.
Late in the 1970s, having heard him play again, my concern that so few people had ever heard him as a pianist (he was always the very opposite of a "career performer") got the better of me and I tried to urge him to perform more often. He dodged the question like a seasoned politician but I continued to press the point in quasi-John Humphrys like manner, whereupon it finally caught him on the raw and he raised his voice and said "would you have me be a travelling salesman in Busoni?", to which, without a moment's thought, I responded "well, that would be a great start!". Er - wrong answer! He momentarily began to seethe - and then backed right off and we both began to laugh at the position in which we'd put one another. He understood and appreciated my concern and why I had expressed it but, likewise, I could see that the difficulty of trying to keep the parallel careers of pianist and composer going simultaneously - hard enough for most - would be especially problematic for him.
Not having spent time
chez Stevenson for far too many years, I recall from what was to be my last telephone conversation with him in August of last year that he touched - though only lightly and never in a complaining way - upon his and Marjorie's increasing health frailties; although his speech was indeed somewhat less animated that I had remembered it, there was clearly no sense of difficulty in conversational engagement. As the call came to its close and I offered my wellwishings, I made some unwittingly crass remark about the need to "soldier on", to which he immediately sprang to the quick-witted manner to which I had earlier become well accustomed by retorting "never! I’m a Pacifist, remember? No Soldaten here!"
And lastly - his calligraphy! A handwritten letter (as they all were) from Ronald Stevenson was a joy to behold!
So - there you have just a tiny fragment of it; all those who knew Ronald Stevenson could easily fill a substantial book between them with reminiscences.
As a parting shot - and to return to his Passacaglia - I note that one of its performers is a pianist who happens to have the same name as you; life's full of coincidences, n'est-ce pas?
Best,
Alistair
Topic: Ronald Stevenson (1928-2015)