About Christine Stevenson enjoys a distinguished career as a piano recitalist and concerto soloist throughout the UK and abroad. Her concerts continually draw critical acclaim for her virtuosity, musicianship, and the engaging rapport she establishes with audiences of all ages. She is an Artistic Director/Tutor at the annual Summer School for Pianists at Stowe in Buckinghamshire, UK [visit www.pianosummerschool.co.uk for details] and is on the staff of the Junior Department of the Royal College of Music in London. She writes about piano music at www.notesfromapianist.wordpress.com. This season's engagements include recitals in Essex, Kent, Oxford, Cambridge, Suffolk, Buckingham and London. She will again be giving masterclasses at the Summer School for Pianists at Stowe, and a presentation titled: 'Walking the Walk - to Chopin's Grave '. Engagements before lockdown included Ralph Vaughan Williams’ ‘On Wenlock Edge’ for tenor, string quartet and piano. During lockdown she recorded and live-streamed recitals of music by Poulenc, Debussy, Liszt and Chopin, and, to celebrate Beethoven's 250th Anniversary, she presented a video about Beethoven's harmonic language - 'The Lost Chord, and How To Find it' - for the Virtual Summer School for Pianists. She gave online masterclasses for the Summer School, and, as socially distanced live concerts gradually resumed, Christine gave a number of live recitals in London and Suffolk. She was honoured to give a live-streamed concert from Bury St Edmund's Cathedral in memory of Prince Philip on the sad day of his passing in 2021. Concerts in 2019 included performances of music for Twenty Digits – piano duet and piano duo – with Gustav Holst’s own arrangement of ‘The Planets’ for two pianos, chamber music by Clara Schumann in a presentation with London Symphony Orchestra's animateur, Rachel Leach, recitals in the UK, and a return visit to France for solo recitals in the Dordogne region. Previous seasons' recitals have explored the worlds of The Romantic Piano, The Ubiquitous Prelude, Pictures at an Exhibition, Vienna 1887, Nocturnes, Death in Venice, Years of Pilgrimage and A Winter in Majorca, while locations have included Highclere Castle (television's Downton Abbey), the Woodend Winter Arts Festival in Australia, 'Chopin in the Park' outdoors, Hatchlands on an historic 1845 Erard piano signed by Thalberg, and return visits to venues in France and throughout the UK. Christine's recordings include music by the award-winning British composer. Thomas Hewitt Jones, and a recording of Liszt's Années de Pèlerinage - II - Italie released on CD and iTunes in the year of Liszt's bicentenary, which received excellent reviews.
|