Bob Stevenson
Bob Stevenson studied the piano from the age of seven with local teachers
and had been engaged to give public performances by the age of thirteen.
After this, his focus on academic work limited both his music lessons and
his concert opportunities but, by way of compensation, he gained a place at
Christ’s College, Cambridge, to read Natural Sciences and Engineering. Here
he gave recitals of solo piano and chamber music and performed concertos
with college orchestras. Upon graduating he took up a career in Management
Consultancy but also built a network of musical contacts which enabled him
to participate in many amateur concerts, publicly performing a variety of
piano concertos ranging from Mozart to Rachmaninov, Liszt and Brahms and
more unusual fare by composers such as Delius, Bloch and Rimsky-Korsakov.
Since 2002 he has continued to give solo piano recitals and has also joined
forces with both the Bridge and the Tippett String Quartets to give
occasional concerts focusing on unjustly neglected music. In 2008, with the
violinist Jacqueline Roche, he made an acclaimed commercial recording for
Dutton of violin sonatas by some obscure English composers – Holbrooke,
Walford Davies and Rootham. This was awarded 9 out of 10 stars in the BBC
Music Magazine.
In 2011, with the violinist Kerenza Peacock and the horn player, Mark
Smith, he made world premiere recordings for Naxos of four pieces by
Holbrooke, including the remaining two violin sonatas (the second in the
form of a reduction for violin and piano of the composer’s only violin
concerto) and the original version of the horn trio. The resulting CD
reached number 19 in the specialist classical charts and was played on BBC
Radio 3. The recording of the horn trio became the BBC Music Magazine’s
recommended version in December 2015.
As his consultancy career winds down Bob remains musically active, learning
and recording some of the standard piano repertoire’s most notoriously
difficult pieces – just to prove that, despite being an amateur with no
formal musical training, he actually can get his fingers around them. He
remains open to the possibility of making further commercial CDs to provide
premier recordings of unusual English music.
“These are fascinating by-ways of British music – pieces one never
expected to hear – but with performances like these anything could
happen. Some of them could even enter the mainstream.” (Peter Dickinson
– The Gramophone, March 2009)
“First rate performances” (Matthew Rye - The Strad, October 2011)
“All the performances are of a high standard, often brilliant and
imaginative” (Duncan Druce - The Gramophone, December 2011)
“Naxos has to be congratulated on this excellent CD. [John France]
Sympathy, sensitivity, skill and enthusiasm in music that will gratify
and surprise .[Rob Barnett] (Music Web International, August 2011)
“The artists have clearly lavished a great deal of care and thought on
these performances and the excellent amateur pianist
Robert Stevenson, a management consultant, has put up the money for the
recordings. I have virtually no criticism of the interpretations.”
(Tully Potter, Classical Recording Quarterly – December 2011)
