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Stevenson Passacaglia on DSCH. Murray McLachlan (pf).
The Divine Art 25013 Full price (75 minutes: DDD).
One would think that, from a catalogue that contains any number
of exquisite
miniatures and one single, massively proportioned contrapuntal
monument,
pianists would generally have chosen the easier, more accessible,
ear-caressing works. But no: just as Havergal Brian's colossal
Gothic
Symphony (orchestra of 200, four choirs) has notched up more
performances
than almost any of the other, usually much more modest, 31 Brian
symphonies,
Ronald Stevenson's most often recorded work is his epic Passacaglia
on DSCH,
a vast and fearsomely challenging canvas close on eighty minutes
long. It
has earned a rightful place in the sparsely populated succession
of titanic
piano scores, beginning with the Goldbergs, evolving through
the
'Hammerklavier', Busoni's Fantasia contrappuntistica and the
profusion of
Sorabji's manic inventiveness, and continuing with Claude Allgén's
Fantasia
of the mid-1950s (and there's another composer who deserves some
serious
attention) and Frederic Rzewski's 36 Variations on 'The People
United Will
Never Be Deafeated'. At its first appearance, in the heyday of
intemperate
modernism, the Passacagalia on DSCH, with its Celtic-inflected
Busonian
polyphony, was seen as a bold, almost political, assertion of
the continuing
validity of tonality; in these more liberal times we can see
it as it as - a
timeless masterpiece.
Stevenson began the Passacagalia on DSCH late in 1960 and it
was
finished in May 1962, although he continued to add to it until
the day he
gave the premiere, in December 1963. He didn't intend to write
what is
commonly reputed to be the longest single-movement work in the
piano
literature - the variations simply flowed: Stevenson usually
quotes in
analogy the flood of river-names in Joyce's Anna Livia Plurabelle
that
itself becomes a river of names. But the Passacaglia is not simply
an
incontinent rush of counterpoint: it is strictly organised, with
a
macro-structure that divides it into three large spans, within
which it is
subdivided into smaller episodes that maximise contrast. The
'Pars prima',
for example, begins with a Sonata allegro and continues with
a Waltz in
rondo form, Episode 2, a Suite (itself divided into a prelude,
sarabande,
jig, another sarabande, minuet, a second jig, gavotte and a polonaise),
Pibroch, Episode 2 and Nocturne. Stevenson thus has the best
of both worlds:
the inexorable onward tread of the passacaglia, which is strictly
maintained
throughout, and a startling degree of contrast. As a result,
it's a work
which telescopes time: on every single occasion I've heard it,
I've worried
that my concentration might not be up to the task, and the music
has not
only always carried me with it but somehow seems to lose half
of its
clock-time in the process - I end up short of 40 minutes.
(continued…)
It wasn't long after the premiere before John Ogdon took up the
work, and his was the first commercial recording, for EMI (and a clear
candidate for re-release on CD). Stevenson's own first recording was a
private one, limited to 100 copies; his later account, for Altarus, was
released first on LP, in 1988, and subsequently on a double CD
(AIR-CD-9091) - a cosmic illustration of piano mastery. Raymond Clarke's
single-disc account on Marco Polo (8.223545), musically admirable, was
hampered by rather congested sound. The back of the jewel box of this new
recording presents an endorsement of Murray McLachlan's pianism by Ronald
Stevenson. Small wonder: the performance is thrilling. His approach to the
work somehow manages to combine an improvisatory freshness and a sense of
the inevitability of the form. McLachlan has long been a champion of
Stevenson's music (recording the two Piano Concertos, for example, on
Olympia OCD 429), and he plays it here as if mastering its praeternatural
difficulties were as natural as running your fingers through your hair. My
only criticisms are of the quality of piano used - it sounds rather clapped
out, and doesn't hold its pitch too well - and of the cover design, which is
ugly. Still, your ears adapt to the piano, and you don't have to look at the
cover all the time. Strongly recommended.
Martin Anderson (International Piano)
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