Customer Reviews

Piano Concertos / Dance Suites

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While the Dance Suite and Piano concerto both have many enjoyable moments and are well crafted, the finest work here is the Variations for Orchestra. Stevens writes in an accessible tonal language with a slight serial bent. The Variations are gritty and terse on first hearing but they stand up very well to repetition. You feel you are in the presence of a first rank composer who knew his stuff and deserved wider exposure. Strongly recommended.

Very good natural recording and well played.

I'm slowly working my way through the available recordings of music by Bernard Stevens (1916-1983), a British composer whom I only became acquainted with in the last few months and who I believe is a real master, at least in some of his works. Earlier I have reviewed a chamber music disc (ASIN B0000AQS7J) and disc featuring string quartet (ASIN B00000E985). The former was exceptional, both in the quality of the works and the performances; the latter was terrific as far as the works are concerned, but I had some misgivings about the performances.

In this disc of orchestral music, nicely played by the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland under Adrian Leaper, we also have a bit of a mixed bag. Two of the works are excellent: The Dance Suite, Op. 28, and the Variations, Op. 36. Less so, I'm sorry to say because I was really looking forward to it, is the Piano Concerto, Op. 26.

The most forward-looking and probably the strongest piece of Stevens's I've heard so far is the Variations. This is a latish piece that is formally a passacaglia based on a tone row. I tend to latch onto twelve-tone music most easily when the form is easily grasped, and that is the case here; and also this tone row is so constructed that there is more than a hint of tonality, in this case E flat major/minor. The Variations open with a set of seven slow variations that function as more or less a 'first movement' in this 18-minute work. Then the mood lightens considerably and leads to a real workout of timbral changes showing real ingenuity in orchestration. Toward the end is a funeral march that leads into extended violin solo that reaches for the rapture of ecstasy. The last five variations function as an energetic leading to a not-so-startling cadence on a grand and glorious E-flat major chord. The natural-sounding structural inevitability of this work is its crowning glory, and each time I've listened to it I've grown more impressed.

Rather different is the Dance Suite in four movements lasting about 19 minutes. It surely was modeled to some extent on Bartók's Dance Suite in that it is not particularly light-hearted but rhythmically ingenious nonetheless. It would be hard to imagine anyone getting up and dancing to any of this music, but there might be some sneaky toe-tapping along the way, although in the somber second movement, a passacaglia in an irregular 5/4, the toe-tapping could never be quite automatic, and although the impulse would be there one would certainly get tripped up in the last movement. The first movement is a dreamlike jig, the second is the passacaglia, the third feels like it's in three much of the time but is, in fact, a 2/2 pavane. The fourth is in an adroitly handled 11/8, or is most of the time. It drives to an exhilarating canonic finish.

The piano concerto somehow doesn't speak to me. It is neatly made, and the pianist, Martin Roscoe, is certainly an able soloist. But the materials strike me as nondescript, in the main, although there is a wonderful theme that is manipulated cleverly in the third movement and the piano soloist gets a thrilling cadenza before the somewhat perfunctory conclusion.

So, for the Dance Suite and particularly for the Variations, this disc is worth having. And I'm sure there are those who would find more than I did in the Piano Concerto. I continue to believe that Bernard Stevens is due more recognition than he currently gets. But that's the way of the world, I guess.

Scott Morrison