Exhibition:

Ronald Stevenson (1928-2015): Scotland’s Franz Liszt

The works of Scottish composer, virtuoso pianist and writer Ronald Stevenson) are among the most fascinating in contemporary music.  For Yehudi Menuhin, who commissioned his Violin Concerto, Stevenson was “one of the most original minds in the world of musical composition”.  He was, moreover, a pianist of genuinely Lisztian panache – so much so that locals would jokingly refer to West Linton, Stevenson’s home village near Edinburgh, as “the Weimar of the North”!  Internationally, Stevenson is best known for his magisterial “Passacaglia on DSCH” – now acknowledged as a classic of the 20th-century piano repertoire.  But his output also included many other imaginative piano pieces, as well as a stunning range of vocal and orchestral music.

Complementing Kenneth Hamilton’s matinee lecture-recital, the multimedia cabinet exhibiton offers a very personal glimpse into the composer’s creative process in his Scottish context, based on loans from private collections and from the composer’s estate.

Curator: Prof. Dr. Monika Hennemann (Cardiff University)