Ronald Stevenson: Stevenson: Piano Music Vol.1 (Christopher Guild)

Christopher Guild’s first volume of Ronald Stevenson’s piano music for Toccata Classics turned out to be the opening instalment of one of the more significant ongoing recording projects in recent Scottish classical music: a series that has since run to eight volumes and more, making Guild by some distance the most thorough recorded interpreter of Stevenson’s substantial output for solo piano. Where Kenneth Hamilton’s own first-volume survey for Prima Facie (reviewed separately on this site) offered a single, self-contained cross-section of Stevenson’s range, Guild’s project was conceived from the outset as a systematic traversal, the beginning of a discography rather than a one-off release.

About the composer

Ronald Stevenson (1928–2015) was a Scottish composer-pianist whose vast, restlessly eclectic output for piano ranged from folk-tune arrangements for children to his epic Passacaglia on DSCH, and who held a deep, lifelong affinity for the tradition of composer-pianists like Liszt and Busoni who wrote virtuosically for their own instrument while also working extensively as arrangers and transcribers. His reputation has grown steadily since his death, helped in no small part by dedicated recording projects like Guild’s, before which large parts of his catalogue existed only in manuscript or single scattered recordings.

About the performer

Christopher Guild studied piano and violin in Moray before entering St Mary’s Music School in Edinburgh at thirteen, and went on to the Royal College of Music in London, studying with Andrew Ball through to master’s level. With the exception of one accompanimental role, his recording career has been built almost entirely around Toccata Classics and, within that, around Stevenson specifically, an unusually singular focus that has made him the composer’s de facto recorded champion. Toccata Classics itself, an independent London label founded in 2005, has built its reputation on exactly this kind of long-form advocacy for underrepresented composers, of which the Guild/Stevenson series is one of its flagship projects.

Where this series went next

Later volumes in Guild’s Stevenson series moved on to further corners of the composer’s output, including a volume devoted to Stevenson’s transcriptions of Purcell, Delius and Van Dieren, and another revisiting his lifelong engagement with the music of Percy Grainger, a composer with whom Stevenson, like Guild after him, felt a strong personal affinity. Taken as a whole, the series has done more than any other single project to make the breadth of Stevenson’s piano writing properly assessable on disc.

A note on this page

No original mmmusic review text for this specific page survived in any archive we could recover, unlike the Kenneth Hamilton volume, where the original critic’s words came through intact. Rather than guess at what was originally written, the text above has been written fresh from verified facts about the recording, the performer and the wider series it began.