Colin Stone

COLIN STONE (piano)

Beethoven in heaven

Bach / Busoni

Chaconne from JS Bach’s D minor Partita                   

Ludvig van Beethoven

Sonata in F major Op 10 #2 

Schubert

Sonata in Bb, D960

The title of Colin Stone’s recital programme comes from a phrase that his teacher, Edith Vogel, used to describe Schubert. We journey from a delightful early sonata by Beethoven (Op 10 #2) to Schubert’s great final sonata in Bb, D960. But first, we hear JS Bach’s Chaconne, from the D minor Partita for solo violin, transcribed for piano by Ferruccio Busoni – a composer and virtuoso pianist with a strong sense of form, and a great love of Bach. It works!

Beethoven’s Sonata in F major, Opus 10 #2, is a beautifully crafted early work, more light-hearted than many of his later compositions. It looks back both to Haydn – with touches of his musical humour – and to Bach – with his sense of form, but also briefly seems to anticipate Schubert in its middle movement.

The last of Schubert’s three late sonatas, D 960 in Bb, is a remarkable final statement from this extraordinary composer. This substantial sonata is, above all, lyrical in character, with a singing quality so natural to this outstanding lieder composer. Only briefly and subtly do we sense the darker undercurrents of his tragic life. It has a cyclical form and is in four contrasting movements, each of which exemplifies Schubert’s ability to convey varied moods with great technical facility.

Watch an interview with Colin Stone, with PMF Director Anthony Pinching.         

Colin Stone’s career as a performer began in the late 1980s. He was encouraged by Sir Charles Groves at the finals of the 1985 Young Concert Artist’s Trust and went on to win the Royal Over-Seas League piano competition in 1986. A debut at the Wigmore Hall and numerous broadcasts on BBC Radio3 helped to establish his growing reputation and has led to performances around the world. A number of acclaimed recordings followed, both of solo repertoire and chamber music with the London Mozart Trio, which he founded in 1989. He made his debut as a soloist with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Grant Llewelyn in 2001, and gave his first cycle of Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas in 2005.

Colin Stone has a particular affinity with the music of Shostakovich. In addition to his recent recording of the Twenty-Four Preludes and Fugues Op.87 he has recorded the two Piano Trios and the Piano Quintet and, with Rustem Hayroudinoff, he gave the first performance in the West of the two-piano version of the Fourth Symphony, op. 43a. He also appears in the documentary film, “The Unknown Shostakovich” along with Vladimir Ashkenazy, Valery Gergiev, Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Maxim Shostakovich, first shown at the Barbican Cinema. He first performed the complete cycle of 24 Preludes and Fugues Op.87 at Cadogan Hall in London in a concert to mark the centenary of the composer’s birth. Vladimir Ashkenazy gave the pre-concert talk.

Colin Stone is a professor at the Royal Academy of Music in London and the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester.