A recital given last month by the young English pianist Mark Gasser making his Wigmore Hall debut in a programme of 20th-century music performed in the presence of all the featured composers. The central work of the evening was the Passacaglia on DSCH by Ronald Stevenson - one of the longest single-movement pieces in music. This work, which is dedicated to Dmitri Shostakovich, is based entirely on the four-note motto that Shostakovich himself extracted from the letters of his name. Stevenson takes the theme on an extraordinary 80-minute musical journey. It is a virtuosic tour de force combining a wide variety of styles, devices and references that pay homage to the keyboard tradition of the past, while conveying some of the political and philosophical ideas that were prominent in the sixties, when the piece was written.
Mark Gasser (piano)
Giles Easterbrook 25 Variations
Judith Bingham Chopin
Ronald Stevenson Passacaglia on DSCH