- published: 21 Sep 2012
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Mark Gasser (born 1972 in Sheffield, South Yorkshire) is a British concert pianist.
Gasser is a fellow of the Birmingham Conservatoire and the Royal Academy of Music. He studied with John Humphreys at the Birmingham Conservatoire, and with Frank Wibaut at the Royal Academy of Music. Later he also studied with Alfred Brendel and Peter Donohoe.
Gasser plays large-scale standard repertoire piano works, in particular the Viennese Classics (Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert) and Edvard Grieg, Felix Mendelssohn, Ferruccio Busoni, and Rachmaninoff, and the French Impressionists Debussy and Ravel. His repertoire ranges from Bach's Goldberg Variations to Messiaen's Vingt regards sur l'enfant-Jésus. As a chamber musician he has performed in all the major chamber music festivals in the US, Europe and Australia and has toured with the virtuoso cellist Mats Lidström.
His concerto repertoire includes more than 70 works ranging from Bach to music from the present day. Gasser collaborates with contemporary composers and has premiered and recorded compositions by 20th-century composers such as Alfred Schnittke, Ross Edwards (composer),Constant Lambert, Benjamin Britten, Henri Pousseur, Henry Cowell, Toru Takemitsu, George Crumb,James McMillan, Alistair Zaldua, Michael Tippett, John Webb, James Dillon, Phillip Whilby, Richard Barrett, Aldo Clementi, Mike Vaughan, John Cage, Luigi Dallapiccola, John Adams, Mark-Anthony Turnage, Olivier Messiaen,Luigi Nono, Edgard Varèse, Judith Bingham, Pierre Boulez, Joël-François Durand, Frank Zappa, György Ligeti and Ronald Stevenson. Gasser has also worked with contemporary artists such as Pink, Jarvis Cocker and Björk.
Ronald Stevenson (born 6 March 1928 in Blackburn, Lancashire) is a British composer, pianist, and writer about music.
The son of a Scottish father and English mother, Stevenson studied at the Royal Manchester College of Music (now incorporated in the Royal Northern College of Music), studying composition with Richard Hall and piano with Iso Elinson, graduating with distinction in 1948. He moved to Scotland in the mid-1950s. As author and performer he was instrumental in reviving the works of Ferruccio Busoni, and corresponded with Percy Grainger.
Among his many compositions, the largest (in terms of duration) and most famous is his Passacaglia on DSCH for solo piano, written between 1960 and 1962, based on a 13-note ground bass derived from the musical motif D-E♭-C-B: the German transliteration of Dmitri Shostakovich's initials ("D. Sch."). Stevenson's work takes more than an hour and a quarter to perform and is the longest well-known unbroken single movement composed for piano, though Kaikhosru Sorabji's Symphonic Nocturne for Piano Alone probably exceeds it by some 45 minutes.