Ronald Stevenson (b. 1928) - Full biography
http://www.scottishmusiccentre.com/ronald_stevenson/
Ronald Stevenson was born in 1928 in Blackburn, Lancashire, Scots on his father's side and Welsh on his mother's. He is keenly aware of his Celtic heritage. Significant events in his musical development were his discovery of the music of Busoni, his friendship with John Ogdon - who became a fellow Busonian - and his correspondence with Percy Grainger.
Stevenson is a Fellow of the Royal Manchester College of Music, where he was a student. He studied keyboard harmony with Thomas Pitfield and piano with Iso Elinson, a pupil of Blumenfeld. Later, he studied orchestration at the Conservatorio di Santa Cecilia in Rome with the Busoni pupil Guido Guerrini. He taught composition and piano in the University of Cape Town 1962-65 and was a visiting Professor at the Shanghai Conservatory in 1985. In 1987 he performed and gave seminars at the Julliard School, New York and paid repeated visits in the 1980s to the Universities of Melbourne and Western Australia as composer in residence.
He has performed on five continents, received the Harriet Cohen International Music Award, and a Living Artist’s Award from the Scottish Arts Council. Premiere landmarks as a composer / pianist have been: the completion and performance of the Passacaglia on DSCH (Cape Town, 1963); attendance as guest speaker at the 45th Congress of the Union of Soviet Composers (Moscow, 1968); performing his song-cycle Border Boyhood with Peter Pears (Aldeburgh 1971); his Piano Concerto No 1 (SNO / Gibson, Edinburgh 1966); his Piano Concerto No 2 (New Philharmonia / Del Mar, London Proms 1972).
In 1992 Sir Yehudi Menuhin, who commissioned Stevenson’s Violin Concerto (The Gypsy), conducted its world premiere with Hu Kun, violin, and the BBC SSO in Glasgow. The Cello Concerto was premiered in 1995 with Moray Welsh as soloist, and his most recent major piano work,, the Festin d’Alkan, was premiered by Marc-André Hamelin in 1998. He has written eight major song cycles, choral works, string quartets, and over 300 songs in addition to many works for piano.
His many BBC radio broadcasts include a series on the Scots Pipe, Harp and Fiddle, and 26 programmes on Busoni’s music.
His music has been published variously by Oxford University Press, Schott, Boosey & Hawkes, Novello, and Roberton, and recordings issued by EMI, Altarus, Marco Polo, and Olympia. His published writing includes An Introduction to Western Music (Kahn & Averill, London 1971), which is as much a guide to his personal view of music as it is music history, and an essay on Paderewski (Klavar Foundation, Lincoln / La Société Paderewski, Morges, Switzerland, 1992).
Stevenson holds honorary doctorates from the Universities of Aberdeen, Dundee and Stirling.
The Ronald Stevenson Society was formed in 1992 to print and publish his music in order to disseminate it for performance. A newsletter is published three times a year with a list of works currently available.