The Listener, 23 October 1969

It was not without some misgivings that I made up my mind to listen to Ronald Stevenson's mammoth Passacaglia. Would I last the course in what the composer himself had described as resembling a sixty-mile cross-country run? In the event, though my attention occasionally wandered, I found the experience rewarding. This work is really a huge set of variations based on a four-note motif. This theme, consisting of the notes D, E flat, C, B, is presented in such a variety of guises that its reappearances never fatigue the ear. The composer uses a freely tonal idiom, and employs a very wide range of pianistic effects. These are incidental; the music itself is always serious and significant. Indeed, I found it sometimes intense and brilliant for too long, and when, in some sections, the cascades of notes endlessly succeeded each other, I was reminded of Disraeli's description of Gladstone as ‘inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity’. But if Stevenson's facility of invention sometimes ran away with him, he emerged as a composer of considerable talent. The work's immense length (nearly an hour and a half) militates against its chance of frequent performance, and I wonder whether it could not be divided into two or even three sections, complete in themselves, that might be performed separately. However this may be, to compose a work of these proportions that holds together, and to be able to play it with this degree of authority and technical command, is an astonishing achievement.