Bernard Stevens

* Dance Suite, op. 38
* Piano Concerto, op. 26
* Variations, op. 36

Martin Roscoe (piano)
National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland/Adrian Leaper
Marco Polo 8.223480 Total time: 62:59

Summary for the Busy Executive: Cool beauties.

Bernard Stevens belongs to a "lost generation" of British composers, most
of whom began around the Second World War.  These include Benjamin Frankel,
Alan Bush, William Alwyn, and Edmund Rubbra.  British cultural life has
often been feudal in nature - one or two large castles dominating the
landscape.  Before and during the War, the castles belonged mainly to
Vaughan Williams and Walton; after, to Britten and Tippett.  Undoubtedly
great figures, they have tended to block out other worthy ones.  Britain in
particular has been blessed with a truckload of composers whose work we are
poorer without.  Since they're all safely dead, ignoring them hurts only
ourselves.

Formal clarity and clean, memorable ideas characterize Stevens's music.
It's beautiful in the way of a Brancusi sculpture.  It may remind some
of Hindemith or Walton, though it's warmer than most Hindemith and not
as physically exuberant as Walton.  Stevens, however, admitted other
influences - notably Ernest Bloch and Shostakovich, whose music doesn't
sound like Stevens's at all.  However, one does sense a similar striving
for the epic note, even though the means differ.  Actually, the composer
he most strongly reminds me of is the American Walter Piston - a similar
rhythmic athleticism, long architectural reach, and narrative drive.

The works on the program come from different phases of Stevens's career:
the Dance Suite and piano concerto from the first bloom of maturity in the
early Fifties, and the Variations from a brief flirtation with dodecaphonic
serialism in the Sixties.

The Dance Suite wouldn't disgrace the title of "symphony," although it
lacks a large sonata-allegro argument.  Essentially, it plays around with
strong and uncommon meters like 9/8, 5/4, and 11/8.  The excellent liner
notes by Malcolm MacDonald suggest a similarity with Bartok's folk-dance
pieces.  I kind of see the point but wonder whether it's just that all 11/8
in a certain tempo sounds similar.  Certainly, Stevens's melodies and
harmonies share little with Bartok's, apart from rhythm.  The music dances,
living up to its title, but it's not particularly light.  The second
movement in particular, a set of variations over a ground in 5/4,
masterfully speeds up and slows down its basic pulse without losing its
ties to the ground.  Furthermore, if you didn't know the piece was in 5/4,
you wouldn't even think about it, so sure is Stevens's sense of phrase.  I
find the slow movement the oddest rhythmically.  Although it moves along in
a blameless 2/2 meter, it sounds rhythmically irregular, as if made up of
odd pieces.  It's sort of the other side of Stevens's mastery of phrase
length:  in this case, the odd pieces always "come out right" in the end.

The piano concerto dates from 1955.  He never heard it.  In 1981, two
years before he died, he created a new, shorter version in the hope
that someone might take it up.  It was a practical move only.  There
was absolutely nothing wrong with the original.  At any rate, the tactic
failed.  Like all of Stevens's concerti, this one furnishes the soloist
with an heroic part.  The drama of the work takes place on a large scale.
The emotions are big, but they are kept from the overblown by a composer
who knows exactly where the border of easy sentiment lies.  The work
reminds me a bit of Vaughan Williams's piano concerto, at least in the
striving characters of their respective opening movements.  The second
movement combines slow movement and scherzo, with a slow frame about a
quick center.  The orchestra dominates the slow frame and sings like a
modern equivalent of Bruckner - almost religiously - with the piano
injecting a personal note, like a solitary singer outdoors at night.
The piano takes over at the quicker part.  One could consider this a
contrapuntal jeu d'esprit, with rapid lines of imitation and stretto,
but for its character of psychological unease.  The trouble affects the
return of the opening material.  The music seems to flicker out in an
extremely poetic coda, but (as a surprise) really crashes into the finale,
a lively and powerful dance.  If you know the early violin concerto, he
tries the same kind of transition there (it seems modeled on similar
things in Beethoven and Brahms), but here he unquestionably brings it off.
Highlights include a mighty cadenza, unusual in the run of cadenzas for its
drama and its sense of continuing the argument of the movement (rather than
interrupting that argument), and many passages of effortless, handsome
counterpoint.

The Variations is indeed a serial work and probably the best thing on the
program from the viewpoint of pure craft.  First, it doesn't sound serial,
or what most people think of as such.  That is, it's not astringent, it's
not a wallow in a rhythmic bog.  It's beautiful in a way that shares a
notion of beauty with composers like Walton, Hindemith, and Simpson.
A listener who clings to 20th-century tonal music like a lifeline would
not have to adjust his ears at all.  There are technical reasons for this.
Simpson constructs his basic material in such a way that it contains
do-mi-sol triads.  Come to think of it, the American tonal composer Richard
Yardumian independently arrived at something similar.  Yet Stevens sounds
no more like Yardumian than he sounds like Schoenberg or Webern.  He always
sounds like himself.  The individual variations are gorgeous - particularly
variation 20, prominent with elfin harp glissandi - but Stevens, like most
composers of variations since Beethoven, plays a double game.  You can, for
example, simply string variations one after the other like beads on string,
without regard for the relative importance of one variation over another.
Or you can, like Beethoven and his successors (including Stevens), think
about the final shape of the resultant necklace.  In short, you construct
a symphonic movement out of variations.  Stevens comes up with another
wrinkle.  His Variations break down into four sections - intro, scherzo,
adagio, allegro:  in effect, a one-movement symphony.  He does all of this
as well as keep up his serial method.  Stevens's serial phase was brief,
but potent.  Everything in this period - the String Quartet No.  2
(Unicorn-Kanchana DKP(CD) 9097), the Symphony No.  2 (Meridian CDE 84174),
and these Variations - stands among the best of his catalogue.  He moved
on, not because of his displeasure with the results, but likely because he
had convinced himself he could do it without compromising his standards or
himself.  The work moves magisterially along, with all kinds of beauties
along the way, and the beauties don't get in the way of the overall
momentum of the work.  I'd compare it thus with Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody
on a Theme by Paganini.

I can't recommend these performances highly enough.  Martin Roscoe plays
the bejabbers out of his solo part in the piano concerto.  Leaper and his
band sound better than many a brighter name - taut rhythms, excellent for
bringing out Stevens's marvelous counterpoint, lyricism that tells without
jerking tears, and above all a sense of architecture.  When you consider
that these are in effect brand-new works, you can legitimately marvel.
This is one of the best CDs I've heard this year.

Steve Schwartz