Mark Gasser: 'Passacaglia on DSCH' Ronald Stevenson (6)

Stevenson's monumental work takes more than an hour and a quarter to perform and may be the longest unbroken single movement composed for piano. The Passacaglia on DSCH is a large-scale composition for solo piano by the British composer Ronald Stevenson. It was composed between 24 December 1960 and 18 May 1962, except for two sections added on the day of the first performance on 10 December 1963. The composer presented a copy of the score to Dmitri Shostakovich, its dedicatee, at the 1962 Edinburgh Festival. The work takes the principle of passacaglia or chaconne - namely, strict variations on an unchanging subject, usually a ground bass, and applies it across a very large single-movement structure that divides into a cumulative design of many different musical styles and forms.