Ronald Stevenson: Transcriptions – Murray McLachlan

Ronald Stevenson never met a melody he couldn’t dress up, take apart, or run through some fantastical harmonic sieve of his own devising. He was Scotland’s answer to a question nobody in London’s musical establishment had thought to ask — what happens if you cross Busoni’s transcendental transcription-mania with Grainger’s folksy tinkering and Alkan’s appetite for excess? The answer, over a very long and stubbornly independent career, filled shelves. Murray McLachlan, who has made something of a specialty of Stevenson’s mountain range of a piano output, gives us three discs’ worth of the answer here. It is by turns delightful, absurd, and, in the case of the Alkan-haunted concerto that anchors disc two, genuinely formidable.

Start with the joke, because Stevenson himself would have wanted it that way. His treatment of Ivor Novello’s “We’ll Gather Lilacs,” tucked into the second volume of his L’art nouveau du chant, sounds for all the world like something a very good pianist might toss off between sets at a seaside Palm Court. Except the harmony keeps getting away from him, sliding sideways into places Novello never intended and wouldn’t have recognized. It’s kitsch reprocessed through a serious musical intelligence, and it is impossible not to grin at it. McLachlan plays it perfectly straight, which is exactly right. Wink at your audience with material like this and you’ve killed it.

The Chopin group that dominates disc one is where Stevenson’s working method comes through most clearly. These aren’t Godowsky-style études-on-études, showing off contrapuntal cleverness for its own sake. They’ve got a puckish, sometimes downright cheeky sensibility running underneath. The Andantino prelude arrangement (track 16) is winsome in exactly the way the word suggests: a little tune given a wink and a shrug. And pairing Chopin with Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumblebee” — track 21, a genuinely mad idea on paper — turns out to be the disc’s best five minutes. It shouldn’t work. It works.

Then there’s the Scottish material, and here Stevenson stops being merely clever and starts being himself. His first Scottish Ballad, built from the old ballad tune “Lord Randall,” pushes past arrangement into something closer to free composition. The “wrong” notes scattered through the texture aren’t wrong at all; they’re Grainger’s fingerprints, that same willingness to let a folk tune get bruised a little on its way to the piano. This is where McLachlan sounds most engaged, too. There’s a rhythmic freedom in his playing here that the more decorous Chopin transcriptions don’t quite call for.

But the main event is Le festin d’Alkan on the second disc, and it really does feel like an event, in the old nineteenth-century sense of a pianist wading into deep water without a rope. The title alone tells you what Stevenson was up to: a solo piano concerto in the lineage Alkan himself invented with his own Concerto for Solo Piano, that monstrous, glorious three-movement beast buried inside the op. 39 études. Stevenson takes Alkan’s themes and refracts them through three movements of variation and fantasia, matching, as much as any mortal pianist can, Alkan’s own peculiar genius for combining absolute technical terror with a dry, almost sardonic wit. There’s a moment in the finale — a ragtime eruption, of all things — that catches Alkan’s black humor and drags it, cackling, into the twentieth century. It’s an audacious stroke and it lands.

McLachlan has lived with this repertoire for years, and it shows in the way he handles the sheer stamina problem. Stevenson writes for the piano the way Alkan and Busoni did, which is to say without much regard for whether ten fingers can plausibly manage it. There are patches, especially in the outer movements of the Festin, where the sound thickens and the clarity that this contrapuntally dense writing needs gets a bit smudged under pedal. Not disastrously. But you notice it, particularly next to McLachlan’s own earlier account of some of this material, which had marginally more air in the textures. Still, nobody plays more Stevenson than McLachlan, and nobody plays it with more evident conviction. There’s no sense here of a pianist working through unfamiliar or uncongenial material, which given the technical demands would be entirely forgivable.

Is this general-audience listening? No, and Stevenson never wanted to be. But for anyone curious about what became of the great Lisztian transcription tradition in an age that mostly lost interest in it, this set is close to indispensable. Three discs, endlessly inventive, occasionally exasperating, never dull. Stevenson believed transcription was itself a form of composition and criticism combined, a way of arguing for music he loved by remaking it in his own image. McLachlan makes the argument stick.