Passacaglia on DSCH
plus variation sets and shorter piano works
James Willshire
Ronald Stevenson (b. 1928): Passacaglia on DSCH plus variation sets and shorter piano works I James Willshire
Disc One Passacaglia on DSCH
PARS PRIMA
1 Sonata allegro [7:06]
2 Waltz in rondo form [3:06]
3 Episode (Presto) [0:29]
4 Suite (Prelude – Sarabande – Jig – Sarabande –Minuet – Jig – Gavotte – Polonaise) [13:16]
5 Pibroch (Lament for the Children) [2:42]
6 Episode: Arabesque Variations [0:44]
7 Nocturne [2:14] PARS ALTERA
8 Reverie-Fantasy [4:28]
9 Fanfare – Forebodings: Alarm –Glimpse of a War-Vision [2:16]
10 Variations on ‘Peace, Bread and the Land’ (1917) [2:19]
11 Symphonic March [2:13]
12 Episode (Volante scherzoso) [0:58]
13 Fandango [2:05]
14 Pedal-point (‘To emergent Africa’) [2:19]
15 Central episode: Etudes [4:00]
16 Variations in C minor [3:35] PARS TERTIA
17 Adagio: Tribute to Bach [1:48] Triple Fugue over Ground Bass
18 Subject I. Andamento [6:00]
19 Subject II. B A C H [6:50]
20 Subject III. Dies Irae [6:18]
Disc Two
Passacaglia on DSCH
(conclusion of PARS TERTIA)
1 Final variations on theme derived from ground (Adagissimo barocco) [10:30]
2 Promenade Pastorale [2:58]
3 Waltzes [8:24] Fugue, Variations and Epilogue on a Theme by Arnold Bax
4 1. Fugue without Protocol (Tema locriano) [4:58]
5 Transition to movement 2 [1:25]
6 2. Intermezzo-Notturno: Omaggio a John Field [1:23]
7 Alla giga [0:44]
8 Marcia funebre (Lento ma con moto) [1:20]
9 Allegro quasi feroce [1:00]
10 3. Epilogue (Andante cantabile) [5:54]
11 Nocturne (Homage to John Field) [5:58]
Variations on a Theme of Pizzetti
12 Tema: movimento di Sarabanda –Riflessione del tema – Transizione [1:17]
13 Variation 1: Con moto amabile [0:22]
14 Variation 2 [0:19]
15 Variation 3: Più mosso (circa allegro) [0:20]
16 Variation 4: Poco meno mosso [0:22]
17 Variation 5 [0:31]
18 Variation 6: Sostenuto solenne [1:13]
19 Variation 7: Alla marcia, molto moderato e quasi automa [1:00]
20 Variation 8: Andante cantabile [0:54]
21 Variation 9: Un po’ più mosso (moderato) [0:26]
22 Variation 10: Allegretto squisito [0:28]
23 Variation 11: Alla siciliana (Allegretto grazioso) [0:30]
24 Variation 12: Alla barcarolla [1:02]
25 Variation 13: Alla tarantella [0:23]
26 Variation 14: Allegro [1:48]
27 Variation 15: Sostenuto [0:32]
28 Variation 16 [2:03] Sonatina No 2
29 Adagietto [3:10]
30 Allegro [4:15]
Total playing time (two discs) [2:20:39]
All works except Passacaglia on DSCH are premiere recordings
Recorded on 10-11 December 2012, 3-5 June and 2 July 2013 in the Reid Concert Hall, University of Edinburgh
Delphian Records Ltd is grateful to Creative Scotland, the Ronald Stevenson Society and the RVW Trust for their generous support of this recording.
Producer/Engineer: Paul Baxter 24-bit digital editing: Adam Binks 24-bit digital mastering: Paul Baxter Piano: Steinway model D, 1995, serial no. 527910
Piano technician: Norman Motion
Cover & booklet design: Drew Padrutt Photos of James Willshire: Ian Dingle
Booklet editor: John Fallas Delphian Records Ltd – Edinburgh – UK www.delphianrecords.co.uk
With thanks to the University of Edinburgh
Lancashire-born and domiciled in Scotland for over sixty years, the composer, pianist and writer Ronald Stevenson is not so much a survivor as the modern re-invigorator of the most precious aspects of the Romantic piano tradition. The son of a railway fireman, he was something of a prodigy, giving recitals and composing from his early teens. He studied with Iso Elinson at the Royal Manchester College of Music but feels that he owes his real education as a musician to the discovery and close study of the works of Ferruccio Busoni and of Percy Grainger (with whom he corresponded). Under these twin influences –and also that of Paderewski, whose music and performing style he deeply reveres – Stevenson developed into a virtuoso pianist of probing intellect, wide-ranging vision, and preternatural sensitivity of touch and pedalling.
A mastery of polyphony, the contrapuntal combination of voices, and the transcriber’s art of re-casting music from one medium to another are key elements in Stevenson’s creative make-up. The European art-music tradition seems totally present to his mind, as it was to Busoni’s; yet, composing on its Scottish edge, he responds equally to the power of folksong and landscape, in the hills of Hugh MacDiarmid’s Border country. (Stevenson’s West Linton home was close enough to Brownsbank to allow a firm, mutually enriching friendship with the poet over twenty years.) Like MacDiarmid in poetry, Stevenson
has felt the need in his music to ‘hail / All the fellow-artists I know’; and his output, like MacDiarmid’s, encompasses the epic and the lyric. Thus in it many voices speak: sometimes with direct, unmediated simplicity, in fragrant miniatures; sometimes in works of such scope, with such freight of meaning, they seem to embody in themselves a kind of cultural nexus.
Such a work, by common consent, is the Passacaglia on DSCH, probably his most celebrated creation: not only a gruelling test of stamina for any pianist, but perhaps the longest continuous movement in the repertoire of the piano, a prodigious essay in an ancient and strict variation form. That form derives ultimately from a seductive Spanish dance (in Spanish pasar calle means ‘to walk the streets’), and it weaves continuous variations above an unvarying ground bass.
Stevenson forms his seven-bar ground from three permutations of the notes D, E flat, C, B: in German nomenclature, which calls E flat ‘Es’ and B natural ‘H’ (and transliterates the Russian letter Ш as ‘Sch’, not ‘Sh’), this spells out the musical monogram ДШ – ‘DSch’ – of Dmitri Shostakovich, who used it in many of his works.
This four-note figure fascinated Stevenson: with its introverted chromaticism, its rising and falling semitones mirroring each other and yet spanning the diatonic interval of the major third, it seemed to enshrine the harmonic
and melodic character of his own music. Like the atomic nucleus whose splitting releases the power of the sun, it was to provide him with the basis for a staggering creative feat. On Christmas Eve 1960, Stevenson started sketching some variations, using D-S-C-H as an immutable ground bass. Conceived at first as pure polyphony with no especial instrumentation in mind, this beginning (two pages’ worth, at one sitting) rapidly opened up a kaleidoscope of possibilities, and the work took on an urgent life of its own, expanding root and branch. As Stevenson wrote in The Listener in 1969:
James Joyce, writing the section ‘Anna Livia Plurabelle’ in his Finnegans Wake, began by weaving a few names of rivers into his prose-poem and went on piling up river-names until the text was a torrent of over five hundred of them. That is something like how I wrote my Passacaglia. I went on piling up variations over that ground bass until they grew into hundreds. I don’t know how many hundreds: I’ve never counted them. I felt the nature of the work was ‘aqueous’ – it should flow. And in the flow should be other forms, similar to what geologists call ‘aqueous rocks’.
Stevenson found himself launched on a year and a half of sustained creative effort. The work was completed (provisionally, as it would turn out) on 18 May 1962, and he was able to present a copy to Shostakovich – the work’s inevitable dedicatee – when the Russian master visited Edinburgh during the 1962 International Festival, at a ceremony presided over by Hugh MacDiarmid.
The paradox of passacaglia form is that a large, ‘seamless’, continuous movement must be produced from the multitudinous separate building-blocks demarcated by the repetitions of the ground. Stevenson’s sovereign handling of his Passacaglia’s enormous structure probably rests, by parallel paradox, on his love of musical miniatures: each variation in this work is in effect a tiny composition in its own right. However, the seven-bar structure of Stevenson’s theme always implies an eighth bar – the first of the next variation – to complete it, producing an onward impetus that is intensified by the cadential motion of the cancrizans figure in the seventh bar. Thus, each variation requires the next, and the music unfolds under an irresistible impetus.
For all its huge size, the Passacaglia – like Beethoven’s Choral Symphony or Wagner’s Ring – simply imposes its own time-scale. The four-note kernel engenders music on a titanic scale, and Stevenson’s masterpiece extends the tradition of Bach’s Goldberg and Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations, of Bach’s The Art of Fugue and of Busoni’s Fantasia contrappuntistica (whose own startingpoint was a completion of Bach’s last, unfinished fugue). All of these works present a kaleidoscope of musical characters by exhaustive variation of a single theme, worked into a powerful architectural design whose intellectual and expressive apex is a fugue, or series of fugues, the imitations and
combinations of voices, episodes, inversions and foreshortenings crowning the structure like the tower of a cathedral.1
By accomplishing all this over a constant and unifying bass, while accommodating a far wider range of musical reference and idiom, Stevenson has dramatically enlarged the genre. He shapes his continuum of variations into a Baroque suite, virtuoso études, a Russian march, a polonaise, a Spanish fandango, reminiscences of Chopin, Shostakovich and Bach, a pulverising evocation of African drumming played directly on the piano strings, a pibroch based on Patrick Mor MacCrimmon’s Cumha na Cloinne (‘Lament for the Children’) and an immense triple fugue. Even this fugue, whose three subjects include the ‘Dies Irae’ plainchant and the musical monogram BACH (B flat, A, C, B natural) which J.S. Bach used 200 years before Shostakovich adopted DSCH, takes place over the inescapable ground bass. It ought to be the work’s climax: yet the most intense and impressive music occurs after this, in the final ‘Adagissimo’ variations. These build remorselessly from a sculptured simplicity, by way of music marked con un senso di spazio quasi gagarinesco (‘with an almost Gagarinesque sense of space’),2 to a vast agglomerative climax that is truly the crown of all that has preceded it.
When provisionally completed in 1962, the Passacaglia lacked two sections: the pibroch-
based ‘Lament for the Children’ and the ‘African drumming’ variations. These Stevenson added in South Africa, where he had gone to occupy a post as Senior Lecturer in Music at the University of Cape Town at the behest of another radically-minded Scottish composer, Erik Chisholm. The ‘Lament’ was composed in the spirit of ‘home thoughts from abroad’, like several important settings of MacDiarmid’s poetry Stevenson wrote around the same time.
‘To emergent Africa’ was inspired by the actual experience of seeing a Bantu musician in the shanty-town of Nyanga, improvising on fifteen drums placed around him in a semi-circle. Both sections were added shortly before Stevenson gave the world premiere of the Passacaglia in the Hiddingh Hall, Cape Town University, on 10 December 1963.
Variation, as the Passacaglia makes overwhelmingly evident, is a cardinal element in Stevenson’s aesthetic. His essays in variation form per se probably began with the 18 Variations on a Bach Chorale (1946).
A slightly later example, the Variations on a Theme of Pizzetti, was composed in 1955, during the six months Stevenson spent in Florence and Rome on an Italian government scholarship, researching Busoni and studying orchestration with Guido Guerrini. The theme is the ‘Sarabande’ from Ildebrando Pizzetti’s 1913 incidental music for D’Annunzio’s verse drama La Pisanella, 3 which premiered at the Théâtre du Châtelet, Paris, a fortnight after
the scandalous first performance there of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps. In the orchestral suite that Pizzetti made from his incidental music, the sarabande is scored for strings alone and entitled ‘La danse de pauvreté et de parfait amour’ (‘… of poverty and perfect love’). This is music, then, with mystical overtones. But while Pizzetti’s movement has eventually a hopeful ending, Stevenson’s variations trace an altogether darker trajectory. La Pisanella’s setting in fifteenth-century Cyprus gave Pizzetti opportunities for ‘oriental’ colouring, heard in the augmented intervals of the Sarabande: a feature of which Stevenson makes use in his variations.
This is a moderate-sized variation set, comparable in scale, say, to Brahms’s Variations on an Original Theme. Stevenson states Pizzetti’s gravely beautiful theme immediately, in A minor, as a solo for the left hand but, before proceeding to the variations, presents it again for right hand solo in C major as a ‘Riflessione’ – basically a free inversion of the original which also indicates that there is a fertile field here for contrary-motion work. Both forms of the theme, as well as its various constituent motifs, are used in the subsequent variations. There are sixteen in all, beginning with a deceptively innocent ‘Con moto amabile’ and building to a jagged toccata in Variation 3. Variation 5 (quavers in contrary motion) leads to the fateful, clangorous bell-sounds of Variation 6 and then a
baleful, crushing ‘robot-like’ (quasi automa) slow march in which the constantly fluctuating time signatures of the opening variations become cross-rhythms from superimposed 3/4 and 2/4 bars. Aspects of the Passacaglia are already being foreshadowed here.
A more relaxed group of variations follows, with a lyrical ‘Andante cantabile’ and then Variation 9, senza accenti e quasi senz’ espressione, which deconstructs the theme into a contrary-motion harmonic skeleton in even crotchets. Variation 11 is a siciliana, No 12 a barcarolle (are those surreal echoes of The Tales of Hoffmann?), No 13 a brief, biting tarantella. No 14, by far the most extended variation, is a brilliant two-part invention frequently and brusquely interrupted by fortissimo chords adapted from the theme’s opening bar. In the tiny Variation 15 the outline of the Theme, deep in the bass, is combined with J.S. Bach’s B-A-C-H monogram.4
The final variation, perhaps the most Busonilike page in the work, is a quiet but uneasy chorale, descending into a profound darkness illumined at the last moment by the glacial (glaciale) starlight of a few triads in the right hand, thinning out to fifths and then to empty, enigmatic octaves.
Many of Stevenson’s compositions have been written quite rapidly – even the Passacaglia could be said, given its huge dimensions, to have experienced a comparatively brief parturition – but others have evolved gradually
over several years, or even decades. A prime example is the most recent work here, the Fugue, Variations and Epilogue on a Theme by Arnold Bax, completed in 2003 although a large part of it was drafted in 1982–83. The theme is the principal subject of the slow movement of Bax’s Second Symphony, and the manuscript bears a dedication ‘For Colin Scott-Sutherland, premier Bax biographer’5 (in the printed edition Scott-Sutherland shares the dedication with Malcolm Porteous). Though not on the scale of the Passacaglia, this is still an imposing work of great architectonic sweep, and one which Stevenson conceived as crystallising his lifelong ‘devotion to a Celtic aesthetic’.
Bax’s theme is in B major, but it will not be heard in full until the epilogue: in the introductory bars Stevenson lets us hear only a variant of its opening eight-note phrase in B Locrian, with an initial tritone leap (F–B) where Bax has a perfect fourth. What evolves, at first as if a simple, relaxed improvisation, trying out the motif in different contrapuntal contexts, is a ‘Fugue without Protocol’ (the term seems to originate with Charles Koechlin) whose innate polyphonic structure only gradually reveals itself. In its dramatic and episodic nature it breaks all scholastic ‘rules’ for fugal composition. If the motif is the fugue-subject, that too changes and metamorphoses before our ears, as the harmonic language expands to a fully chromatic tonality and dissonant counterpoint: so the principle of variation (and
the sectionality of variations) is at work from the outset. There is both the intricacy and involution of Celtic knotwork and the inherent drama of eldritch contrasts (gaunt entries over a thrumming pedal bass, a dance-episode in 7/8, and so on). After a tremendous organ-like outburst, the Fugue ends in a fanfare; and a bitonal transition (hinting now at the second limb of Bax’s theme, which starts to play its part in the proceedings) leads us to the Variations proper.
Four in number, these begin with an ‘Intermezzo-Notturno’ – a homage to John Field, at one point very similar to the early Nocturne also included on this disc – and proceed through a strenuous jig to an intense ‘Marcia funebre’ conceived in Alkanesque orchestral colours. Finally an ‘Allegro quasi feroce’ (though there seems nothing quasi about this ferocious music) puts an obsessional variant of the theme through new contrapuntal contexts (canon, contrary motion) and leads straight into …
… the Epilogue. Which begins with a liquid, murmuring texture and concerns itself with an inverted form of the theme: Bax often used an epilogue as a device to bring calm and closure to a turbulent symphonic argument, but Stevenson’s continues the variation process, working out yet new possibilities. A tidal surge of undulating, sonorous arpeggios seems proudly to cast the theme (whose
physiognomy is becoming clearer all the time) upon the rise and fall of Hebridean seas. A final transition, cantabile semplice, reminiscent of the very opening of the Fugue, prepares us for the entry – at once culmination and benediction – of the Theme in full, finally in Bax’s B major. But Stevenson reconceives and re-spaces Bax’s harmonies – in a word, pianises them – for the two hands. The result is both an elaboration and an opening-out of the orchestral texture. After which nothing remains to be said, apart from the quiet finality of three simple, ‘gong-like’ triads: major–minor–major.
Time and again in Stevenson’s output – in the Passacaglia, in the variation sets, and in the shorter works also included here – we encounter rare felicities of pianism, reflections of a lifetime’s garnered experience of the piano and its potential: whether in radical and startlingly unexpected textures, or in the simplest elements such as the voicing of chords or the position and interplay of the two hands. Promenade Pastorale is an excellent example of Stevenson’s gift for miniature. Composed at Christmas 1973, it is subtitled ‘Hommage à Francis Poulenc et à Graham Johnson’, uniting the French composer with one of his most notable British keyboard interpreters. The melodies of this delightful piece capture perfectly Poulenc’s blithe en plein air manner, as well as his occasionally naughty tonal side-slips. Also, the pastoral
resounds occasionally with farmyard sounds: although the piece is very much à la française, perhaps Stevenson was thinking here of Francis George Scott’s song ‘Country Life’, to words by Hugh MacDiarmid.
The Nocturne (Homage to John Field) was written in June–July 1952 under the title Nocturne after John Field; Stevenson later gave it the present title to indicate that the music is his own rather than a transcription from Field, whose works he greatly admires. It exists also in versions for flute and piano and clarinet and piano, but the piano form is the original. Here the pianist is entreated to pedal con sottigliezza (‘with subtlety’). The effect of this piece is rather as if one of Field’s salon nocturnes has been rewritten by Alkan and Busoni: the principal key is a much-expanded B flat, and while phraseology and keyboard filigree recall the early nineteenth century, the harmonic vagrancy into deep, dark chromatic waters certainly does not. In fact as the piece proceeds the music feels less like a nocturne than a barcarolle. An E flat cantabile section presents us with something like a gondolier’s serenade. The opening music returns sognante (‘dreaming’), a semitone up from its original appearance, and eventually subsides, via phosphorescent Busoniesque figurations, to a calm close.
The set of Waltzes Stevenson composed between December 1949 and January 1950
distantly resembles a sequence of short Schubertian Ländler, but it betrays a more immediate model in Busoni’s Tanzwalzer – like which it exists in both solo piano and orchestral versions.6 Of course Chopin, and perhaps Godowsky’s Strauss waltz paraphrases, and maybe even Sorabji’s Valse-Fantaisie lurk in the shadows outside the ballroom too. This is a single-movement dance-poem in several sections whose immediate aim is clearly the sheer enjoyment of its artful (though seemingly artless) parade of good tunes, cunningly related though they are to one another in the overall scheme of things. From the ‘Moderato fantastico’ introduction, through the first waltz, elegantamente, a cheeky fanfare, a principal energico section in which the first waltz is developed and gives way to a thrilling alla Zingaresca and finally a glittering coda on the main waltz-tune, one is overwhelmingly aware of the sheer physicality of this music. Here comprehensively Stevenson lets his hair down (most of his other works of this period are deeply serious) while exploring the outer limits of chromatically-expanded tonality.
Stevenson has written no piano sonata: he has been known to deprecate the duality of the post-Beethovenian sonata form in which a ‘masculine’ first subject overbears a ‘feminine’ second.7 Near the head of his chronological worklist, however, stand three Sonatinas for piano. The choice of title, while descriptively accurate in its own right, may also be a nod
to Busoni, whose six sonatinas all in their different ways avoid any intimation of classical sonata form. All three Stevenson works display the muscular, dissonant counterpoint which was a trademark of his thinking from his earliest years. Sonatina No 2 dates from 1947 and is the shortest of the three: it has two movements, a lyric ‘Adagietto’ paired with an ‘Allegro con moto’ finale. The charm of the first movement and the exuberance of the second encapsulate, in the most direct way, the dynamic polarity of song and dance with which Stevenson would be concerned throughout his career. A slight Hindemithian tinge to the part-writing betrays another early influence, which Stevenson had celebrated openly in the Minuet: Homage to Hindemith for oboe and piano, written just before.
© 2013 Malcolm MacDonald
Malcolm MacDonald was for over thirty years Editor of Tempo, the quarterly journal of modern music. He has written on a wide spectrum of music from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries, including books on Brahms, Schoenberg, Varèse, John Foulds and a three-volume study of the symphonies of Havergal Brian. His Ronald Stevenson: A Musical Biography was published by the National Library of Scotland in 1989.
1 Strictly speaking the Goldberg Variations do not culminate in a fugue; but the cheerful and apparently anarchic ‘Quodlibet’ with which Bach prefaces the da capo of the theme represents a similar order of contrapuntal mastery.
2 The Passacaglia coincided with the dawn of the Space Age, and Yuri Gagarin’s first orbit of the Earth. I don’t think I have seen it commented on that the music beginning eleven bars after the gagarinesco direction evokes, in sidelong homage, the G minor Prelude from No 22 of Shostakovich’s 24 Preludes and Fugues, Op. 87.
3 Stevenson would compose a second set of variations on this theme in 1961, for unaccompanied violin: unrelated to the piano set.
4 One thinks here of the variation ‘Simbolo’ in Dallapiccola’s Quaderno musicale di Annalibera [recorded by David Wilde on Delphian DCD34020].
5 It’s probably not irrelevant to note that Stevenson’s chosen theme appears, with Bax’s full harmonisation, as Example 14 on pp. 139-40 of Scott-Sutherland’s Arnold Bax (London: J.M. Dent, 1973).
6 Busoni composed Tanzwalzer from the outset as an orchestral work; the solo piano version was prepared for him by his pupil Michael von Zadora. The later orchestral arrangement of the Waltzes is Stevenson’s own.
7 He has, however, composed a Violin Sonata (1947, originally Sonatina Concertante), a Harpsichord Sonata (1968) and a Duo Sonata for harp and piano (1970–71), all of which avoid the masculine/feminine opposition in different ways. And we should note Stevenson’s virtuoso piano transcriptions (1981–82) of Ysaÿe’s six Sonatas for unaccompanied violin, Op. 27, which perforce become piano sonatas in their new guise. But Ysaÿe’s sonatas freely adapt Baroque structures, also without creating that opposition.
James Willshire
James Willshire appears as a concerto soloist, solo recitalist and chamber musician. He has performed a wide-ranging concerto repertoire with orchestras including the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and The Ensemble of London. He has given solo recitals at concert halls and festivals throughout the UK, Europe, Russia and the USA, and has toured India three times.
Youth Orchestras where he appeared as guest soloist, the Victoria International Arts Festival and the Paxos International Festival. He has given concerts in the Bridgewater Hall, Barbican Hall and Royal Festival Hall, at which last he gave his debut recital in 2008. Broadcasts include live performances on the Performance Channel and Indian National Radio and appearances on British and Irish television.
In 2000, at the age of fifteen, James was awarded an Educational Scholarship in the London International Piano Competition, the youngest British pianist to be thus recognised. He has performed at festivals throughout the UK and abroad, including the Lichfield, Cheltenham and Winchester festivals, the Kilkenny Arts Festival, the Cantilena Festival, the Edinburgh Fringe, the Roman River Festival, ‘Il Festival di Londra’ in Italy where he gave the opening recital, the Glasgow Festival of
A regular performer of contemporary music, James’s debut recording on Delphian (DCD34098) featured the complete piano music of the Scottish composer Rory Boyle; it was released in 2011 to critical acclaim, including a five-star review from The Scotsman.
James maintains a strong interest in music education and teaches piano at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.
Also available on Delphian
Rory Boyle: Solo piano music; Phaethon’s Dancing Lesson
James Willshire piano, Bartholdy Trio
DCD34098
In Rory Boyle’s sixtieth year, virtuoso pianist James Willshire’s debut recording pays birthday tribute, exploring the full gamut of Boyle’s compositional personality – from the cragginess of his finely wrought Sonata to the intensely human lyricism of Tatty’s Dance, itself a sixtiethbirthday present for Boyle’s wife. Dancing is also the subject of Boyle’s second piano trio, in which Willshire is joined by his fellow members of the Bartholdy Trio.
‘Judging by this CD he deserves to be better known ... a distinctive voice and fluent imagination’
– Financial Times, April 2011
‘brilliantly sustained by [pianist] James Willshire … compelling listening’
– The Arts Desk, May 2011
Ronald Stevenson: A’e Gowden Lyric
Susan Hamilton soprano, John Cameron piano
DCD34006
Since first performing Ronald Stevenson’s music as a treble in 1985, when she gave the broadcast premiere of A Child’s Garden of Verses, Susan Hamilton has brought Stevenson’s songs to audiences throughout Britain and abroad. The present recording features her unique, clarion voice in the soprano version of that work, alongside settings of Scots poems by Hugh MacDiarmid and William Soutar and a short translated verse by the Gaelic poet Sorley MacLean.
‘an astonishingly pure voice ... the ringing accuracy of Hamilton’s intonation is a continual marvel ... The recording is beautifully balanced and clear as a bell’
– International Record Review, June 2003
Scotland at Night
Pärt – Skempton – MacMillan – Cunningham – Stevenson Laudibus / Mike Brewer
DCD34060
The virtuosic young singers of the chamber choir Laudibus take on an inventive programme of settings of Scottish poetry by some of today’s leading composers. The texts range from John Barbour and Henry the Minstrel to Alexander McCall Smith, and the latter’s two choral song cycles written together with composer Tom Cunningham are at the heart of the disc. From the ethereal tenderness of Cunningham’s ‘Lullaby’ to the muscular angularity of Ronald Stevenson’s A Medieval Scottish Triptych, Laudibus responds with affection, athleticism and an extraordinary expressive range. Mezzo-soprano Beth Mackay contributes solo Burns settings by Arvo Pärt and Howard Skempton.
‘This youthful chamber choir, served by near-ideal recorded sound and a compelling programme, produces an extraordinary range of tonal colours and shadings’ – Classic FM Magazine, September 2009
Dallapiccola: a portrait
David Wilde piano, Susan Hamilton soprano, Nicola Stonehouse mezzosoprano, Robert Irvine cello, members of Fell Clarinet Quartet DCD34020
Luigi Dallapiccola is one of the most celebrated Italian composers of the twentieth century. This disc features chamber music and songs alongside his complete works for solo piano. Whether drawing on the music of the past to nourish the contrapuntal organisation of his own, or concentrating on the opportunities for gentle lyricism afforded by bell-like instrumental and vocal sonorities, Dallapiccola’s commitment to traditional expressive nuance has been seen by critics as a powerful aspect of his Italian insistence upon cantabilità – songfulness.
‘a marriage of discipline and imagination of which Wilde is fully aware ... [Stonehouse] is eloquence itself in the Goethe-Lieder’ – Gramophone, April 2007