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Bernard Stevens was born in London in 1916. He studied at Cambridge University and the Royal College of Music in London, where he gained the highest awards. After his army service he came to national prominence in 1946 with the Albert Hall premiere of his deeply-considered and utterly un-jingoistic Symphony of Liberation, which won a competition sponsored by the Daily Express newspaper for a "Victory Symphony" to celebrate the end of World War II. Stevens spent much of the rest of his career lecturing at the Royal College of Music (also, latterly, at the University of London), and became a tireless champion of contemporary music, an indefatigable examiner, and that rare being, a born teacher - whose warmth, encouragement and intellectual stimulation is remembered with affection and respect by his many students.
He continued to compose, of course. His life's work includes an opera on J.M. Synge's The Shadow of the Glen, two symphonies, three concertos, copious chamber music, cantatas and other choral pieces, piano music, songs, and other compositions for instruments as diverse as natural trumpet and guitar. This output impresses the hearer immediately by its downrightness and strength, its commitment to humane musical values, to firm architecture and the traditional crafts of counterpoint and variation. Widely and acutely learned in 20th-century music, Stevens acknowledged the early influence of Ernest Bloch and later of Shostakovich, but his personal idiom is independent of his older friends and colleagues Alan Bush and Edmund Rubbra. He shared Bush's left-wing affiliations, and also something of Rubbra's religious mysticism, but he also sometimes said that he had perhaps learned more from Busoni than any other modern composer. As such sympathies suggest, there is nothing flashy about Stevens's music; and in the 1950s and 60s, as Britain strove to catch up with the Continental avant-garde, his robust independence of fashion hardly helped to gain his works prestige. Nor did his politics endear him to the Establishment. Occasionally, wryly, he spoke of himself as one of an "almost lost generation" of British composers; yet as a craftsman and a musical mind he must be judged one of that generation's leading figures. Since his death in 1953 after several years of crippling illness, there has been a remarkable upsurge of interest in Stevens's output: this disc of chamber music for strings follow Albany Records' issue of his opera and his song-cycle The True Dark (TROY 415).
The Theme and Variations for string quartet, composed in 1948-9 and first performed by the Hurwitz Quartet at the 1949 Cheltenham Festival, was in some ways the culminating achievement - or ultimate distillation - of a very rich early compositional harvest that had included Stevens's fine Piano Trio, the Symphony of Liberation, Violin Concerto, and a powerfully concise Sinfonietta for string orchestra. The Theme - a noble inspiration with important accompanying harmonies whose tonal trajectory starts from E flat, moves to its polar opposite A, and back again - is followed by 12 Variations: however, the composer envisaged four continuous "movements," formed by groups of variations, inhabiting the single large overall span. (In this sense the work is similarly laid out to the Symphonic Variations of another great English composer, Sir Hubert Parry.) Stevens's sequence of Variations I-V - an Adagio extension of the Theme, a lyrical Allegretto, an angular splintered Allegro, a witty pizzicato study, and a concluding sarabande-like variation with the Theme in augmentation -therefore functions as a "first movement." The quick variations VI-VIII do duty for a capricious scherzo, and the "slow movement" is made up of Nos. IX-XI: respectively a Beethovenian funeral march, a remote, withdrawn restatement of the Theme in exact inversion, and a canon by inversion at the 12th against simultaneous high and low pedals. The Finale, Variation XII, is an Allegro deciso fugue on a completely new subject, vigorously worked out, whose climax - and satisfying conclusion in a triumphant E flat major - is attained in sonorous combination with the original Theme. The early performances of the Theme and Variations confirmed Stevens's reputation at that time as one of the leading British composers of his generation. Reviewing it in 1952, Hans Keller commented: "There could hardly be two more different English creative characters than Stevens and Britten, yet in the sight of History they are equal."
The Lyric Suite for string trio dates from 1958. In this serious and dark-hued music, structural unity is again ensured through the principles of thematic transformation and variation from one movement to another. Since the Theme and Variations Stevens had written a number of single-movement chamber and instrumental works with the generic title of Fantasia. Perhaps the best-known of these is his solo piano Fantasia on Giles Farnaby's Dreame (1953), and all of them had explicitly or implicitly drawn upon the extended instrumental fantasia forms cultivated by the great Elizabethan composers. The five-movement Lyric Suite likewise looks to the past for the outlines of its form (which may have been suggested by the string sonatas of Purcell, or even the intense, brooding consort music of William Lawes), but it is also a transitional work, anticipating the more radical tonal language Stevens was to adopt in his Second String Quartet. Nevertheless, despite the measure of interest in serial working which might be detected in this music, the title Lyric Suite should surely be accepted at face value, not as an allusion to Alban Berg.
Stevens here steers well clear of sonata procedures and proportions: a short "Introduzione" presents the three instruments muted, violin and viola feeling their way towards thematic statement by' means of small fragments of scale in close harmony and contrary motion, while the cello muses on tritone intervals that begin to define the Lyric Suite's tonal center as D. This passes directly into a hectic, bravura Scherzo that welds the melodic fragments of the Introduction into an obsessive, moto-perpetuo character. The first of two slow movements is a rather melancholy Intermezzo, with a flavor of Shostakovich in its sinuous cantabile melody, whose first long-breathed phrase states nine different pitches of the chromatic scale before repeating any of them. There follows an even slower polyphonic invention on a ground, headed "Passacaglietta": the spirit of Purcell seems especially strong here, and the 13-note bass (which relates to the Intermezzo theme) again uses nine different pitches. This movement presently introduces the finale - a bright, capricious fugue in whose course several earlier ideas are recalled, and which issues in a combination of fugue subject and ground to precipitate a triumphant D major conclusion.
Stevens's String Quartet No.2 (his use of the number shows he regarded the Theme and Variations as No.1), written in 1962, is a comparatively expansive work in four movements, and perhaps his chamber-music masterpiece. It is also one of three compositions (with Symphony' No.2 and the Variations for Orchestra) to display his keen but undogmatic interest, as a strongly tonal composer, in the internal logic and melodic and harmonic consistency offered by Schoenbergian serial techniques. The quartet is based on a 12-note row divided into two pairs of triads, one major, one minor, the constituents of each pair a tritone apart. Stevens treats each diatonic triad-segment as a germinal cell in its own right. Note-order within each triad (and the succession of the triads themselves) remains unfixed, as long as all 12 pitches are sounded in turn. This allows him to exploit the row's basic properties to work a contrasting seam of linear chromaticism. The result is surely one of the most elegant solutions to the challenge of writing serial music that retains a firm tonal basis.
Little of this will (or should) be apparent to listeners, who are much more likely to respond to the lucidity and passion of one of Stevens's most deeply-felt works. A calm Andante introduction stating the fundamental row in its simplest harmonic and melodic terms, leads to a quicker, sonata-like main movement (Poco piu mosso) that draws its contrasted subjects from different forms of the basic row. Building to an impassioned climax, this subsides to a coda of rather wintry serenity. A Presto scherzo, also of sonata proportions, emerges in muted whispers on viola and cello, rapidly developing into a dazzling furioso display-piece, frequently characterized by torrential semiquaver patterns and virtuoso deployment of the ensemble. After a peaceful introduction, the Aadgio slow movement proves to be the emotional heart of the Quartet. Cast as a chaconne (on a form of the row propounded as a ground bass by the cello), this nobly elegiac music must rank among Stevens's finest inspirations. Towards the end the first violin breaks into a rhapsodic solo, and then carries the chaconne theme to the heights, before an urgent, recitative-like transition to the Allegro finale. This vigorous movement has something of the hectic, driven nature of the scherzo, and as the pace increases the music incorporates reminiscences of the scherzo, the chaconne, and finally the opening theme of the first movement. In its end Stevens's Quartet finds its beginning, converging on a trenchant statement of the opening triadic cell and confirming the C-minor-major tonality which has underlain this splendid work from the start.
- Malcolm MacDonald (c)1990/2001
The Delmé String Quartet
The Delmé String Quartet is numbered among the United Kingdom's most distinguished and respected ensembles and, since it was formed in 1962, has established an international reputation as a leading interpreter of the classical repertoire.
Equally renowned for its championing of contemporary music, the Quartet has collaborated with a number of key composers of the 20th and 21st centuries and the music of Bernard Stevens is foremost in their repertoire.
The Delme' String Quartet appears on the Hyperion label performing the music of Robert Simpson and on Chandos performing Daniel Jones's eight Quartets.
The Quartet has appeared at all the major British festivals and in London's key concert halls such as the Queen Elizabeth Hall, South Bank Centre and Wigmore Hall and abroad at the Musikverein in Vienna, the Dvorak Hall in Prague and at the Salzburg Festival. Featured in major film soundtracks, the Quartet is frequently heard on BBC broadcasts.
Members include Galena Solodchin and John Trusler, violins; John Underwood, viola; and Jonathan William, cello.
Theme and Variations for String Quartet, Op. 11 is published by Lengoick.
String Quartet No.2, Op. 34 is published by Bardic Edition.
Lyric Suite for String Trio, Op. 30 is published by Bardic Edition.
Cover Photo: Bertha Stevens
(c) 2001 THE BERNARD STEVENS TRUST
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