Ronald Stevenson’s keyboard aesthetic mirrored his role models Ferruccio Busoni and Percy Grainger in several respects. One is that Stevenson often used other composers as a jumping-off point, blurring the boundaries between transcription and original work. Another is that Stevenson’s musical ideas tend to take precedence over pianistic expediency, notwithstanding the fact that the keyboard layout is unquestionably idiomatic, if never quite so scintillating in the sense of Liszt and Rachmaninov, or Barber and Boulez for that matter.

As such, his piano works don’t ‘play themselves’. Kenneth Hamilton, however, seems entirely attuned to this repertoire, which comes as no surprise, given his friendship and musical association with the composer. In the Little Jazz Variations on Purcell’s ‘Little Scotch Tune’, for example, Hamilton shapes the theme in plainer terms compared to the rounded phrasing characterising Murray McLachlan’s recording (Divine Art, 5/13), and brings more intensity and urgency to the chordal syncopations, although McLachlan obtains more variety in timbre and dynamics.

If Christopher Guild’s interpretation of the Chorale-Pibroch for Sorley Maclean (Toccata Classics) benefits from an overall slower tempo and subtler string strumming, the decorative high-register passages sparkle more in Hamilton’s supple hands. Hamilton also wields a lighter, more incisive touch than Guild in Barra Flyting Toccata. By contrast, the purring arpeggios and double notes with which Stevenson transforms Frank Merrick’s faux-Debussy Hebridean Seascape benefit from Guild’s superior textural transparency.

Hamilton’s authoritative performance cannot make Stevenson’s rather convoluted and forced Sonatina based on themes from Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera sound the least bit interesting. Yet when Stevenson reworks Purcell in his own image, the results prove more fluent and organic, and Hamilton’s playing truly comes into its own. Hamilton’s booklet notes not only provide first-hand insights on the composer and these works but are as detailed and informative as you’d expect from one of Romantic pianism’s most knowledgeable scholars.