Ronald Stevenson

Born: March 6, 1928;

Died: March 28, 2015.

Ronald Stevenson, who has died aged 87, was a proud, intelligent, idiosyncratic pianist, composer and arranger who devoted years of his life to writing a vast, authoritative, never-ending biography of his distinguished German-Italian musical predecessor Ferruccio Busoni.

Busoni's opera Doktor Faust was a work Stevenson himself might have composed, had he been a composer of operas. Instead he paid lavish tribute to it in the three movements of his Faust Triptych, also known as the Prelude, Fugue, and Fantasy for solo piano (1959), which he subsequently transformed into his flamboyant Piano Concerto No 1 (1960).

With his trim goatee beard, theatrical coat and broad-brimmed fedora-style hat, he came as close as he could (though never perhaps quite close enough) to being a sort of Busoni-like figure himself, or at least the very model of a romantic composer of the Busoni period. In his thirties, he was capable of attracting anyone's attention as he strolled around Edinburgh, holding forth to whoever was with him about Bernard van Dieren, Peter Warlock, the Peebles-born Cecil Gray and other sacred monsters of the early 20th century with whose music he seemed obsessed.

More often than not, he could be found deeply in dialogue in the bar of the Cafe Royal, his favourite Edinburgh pit-stop, though he also gave semi-private, neo-Lisztian piano recitals on the Scottish Arts Club's ultimately somewhat ramshackle Steinway grand in Rutland Square.

As a pupil of the Russian pianist Iso Elinson (who was a pupil of Felix Blumenfeld, who was a pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov) he possessed a keyboard virtuosity more than sufficient to make him an imposing public performer, although he held back from ever becoming a full-time pianist.

But as an exponent of his own huge masterpiece for solo piano, the 80-minute Passacaglia on DSCH (Shostakovich's initials in German nomenclature), he was rivalled only by the indefatigable John Ogdon, at one time a fellow student at what is now the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester.

Stevenson's passacaglia remains the most comprehensive work of its kind, paying homage not only to Shostakovich but to the art of the Scottish pibroch, among many other things, in the course of its grandly unfolding contrapuntal progress. Though shorter than Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji's famously formidable Opus Clavicembalisticum, which lasts up to four hours and which, after it was published, he forbade anyone to perform, it made similar demands on its exponents, as also did Busoni's Fantasia Contrappuntistica, another notorious keyboard marathon.

Though Stevenson, when performing his own challenging masterpiece, invariably managed to keep cool, nobody else - not even Ogden in a memorable Aldeburgh Festival recital - ever tackled it without an increasingly visible degree of effort. The sight of that sturdy pianist's perspiration trickling down his forehead to his nose and lips, then into his beard and eventually out of his beard again, as it did on that Aldeburgh occasion, went down in musical history.

He wrote letters with a specially sharpened quill in ostentatious italic script. Even the sight of a Stevenson manuscript could immediately rivet attention, making the very act of composition seem as alluringly visual as it was musical.

Born in Blackburn in Lancashire, he was of working-class parentage, the son of a Scottish railway fireman and a Welsh mill worker, and grandson of a bargee on the Leeds-Liverpool canal. His future must in early days have been hard to predict, but music, politics, and pacifism, with family encouragement, quickly had him in their grip. Having completed his musical studies with special distinction in 1948, he refused to do national service and was imprisoned as a conscientious objector, reading Albert Schweitzer's biography of Bach in his prison cell.

Moving to Scotland in 1952, and developing an engagingly warm Scottish accent, he befriended Hugh MacDiarmid, whose poetry inspired some of his innumerable songs. From 1962 until 1965 he was in South Africa as senior lecturer in composition at Cape Town University. On his return he received the Harriet Cohen International Music Award for a radio programme, one of almost 30 he presented on the Busoni centenary in 1966.

By then he was becoming a world figure. Shanghai Conservatory appointed him a visiting professor. The Juilliard School of Music in New York invited him to perform and to give seminars. Australia welcomed him as a champion of the music of Percy Grainger, the Melbourne-born maverick whose reputation he boosted and with whom he corresponded assiduously. A film of his devoted, intent performance of Grainger's Rosenkavalier Ramble, an intricate keyboard tribute to Richard Strauss, can be viewed on You Tube.

Here in Scotland, Victoria Crowe was commissioned to paint him for the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. His Violin Concerto, named The Gypsy, was commissioned in 1992 by Yehudi Menuhin, who conducted its premiere with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, with Hu Kun, Menuhin's young Chinese protege, as soloist. The Cello Concerto in memory of Jacqueline Du Pre, commissioned by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, was premiered by Moray Welsh in 1995.

Maintaining his political beliefs, Stevenson was vice-president of the Workers' Music Association, supporting peace, internationalism and social justice. A Ronald Stevenson Society was founded in Edinburgh in 1993, publishing quarterly news letters in celebration of his achievements.

Yet if all this suggests a busy, prosperous public career, and if Stevenson's enthralling articles in The Listener and other musical publications suggested that he could have become one of Britain's finest music critics, there was a more private side to the man which in later life kept him out of the limelight and deprived him of some of the acclaim that his admirers considered to be his due.

But questions about his attainments had by then begun to be asked. Was his music really as good as was claimed? Should his songs, which were sprouting like Schubert's, not be winning more attention? Was the second of his two piano concertos - a comprehensive tribute to world music entitled The Continents - too big for its boots?

As Kenneth Elliott and Frederick Rimmer declared in their BBC publication, A History of Scottish Music, time will tell whether Stevenson's resolute personal credo in composition, much of it counter to the outlook of today, will prove sufficiently vital to endure. Yet, whatever happens, his Passacaglia on DSCH is surely a masterpiece of a special sort and, in the words of the above writers, "a mighty and monumental creative achievement unique in 20th century music."

Ronald Stevenson is survived by his wife Marjorie, by his two daughters (Gerda an actress and stage director, Savourna a clarsach player and composer), and by his son (Gordon, who makes violins). His granddaughter Anna Wendy Stevenson continues the family's traditions by being an outstanding folk fiddler, lecturer and composer.

CONRAD WILSON