<<<  <<  -- 3 --  Patric Standford    REMARKABLE SCOPE

Malcolm MacDonald covers the orchestral works, the violin and cello concertos and both piano concertos. Alastair Chisholm and Derek Watson write respectively on the chamber music and songs, and Jamie Reid Baxter on the Choral Music (which includes groups of songs for children's choir) and on Stevenson's very special relationship with Scotland.

Then follows a group of 'Eight Portraits' by close friends -- Alan Bold's in verse, John Ogden, and Albert Wullschleger remembering the visit by Ronald and Marjorie Stevenson to Dornach in Switzerland where Rudolph Steiner's Goetheanum is the nerve centre of anthroposophy, a spiritual enlightenment with which I too have great sympathy.

There are nine splendid appendices that take up about two fifths of the volume, these including coverage of Stevenson's recital programmes, his childhood, a series of short piano pieces in facsimile, bibliography, discography and an exhaustive list of works upon which Martin Anderson has devoted much detailed care. With its wonderful display of photographs, this is without doubt among the most generous and comprehensive books on any British composer, and its fascinating and prolific subject -- surely among the very greatest of British musicians -- deserves every page of it.