STUART Thyne -- pianist, musicologist, and teacher extraordinaire --

died in Edinburgh last spring. As one of his lucky pupils I was taught

Bartok and Prokofiev when others of my generation were trudging through

Czerny and Barbara Kirkby-Mason.

This week, in his memory, a more recent pupil, Katherine Durran, gave

a Queen's Hall recital of the sort Stuart himself would have favoured:

wide-ranging, quick-changing, the art of the miniature more prominently

celebrated than that of the large-scale masterpiece.

Luciano Berio's Sequenza No. 4 -- ten minutes of darting, splintery,

mercurial music interwoven with sudden hesitant chords, resonancies,

silences -- formed the heart of the programme, a dramatic monologue as

gripping today as it was in the Edinburgh Festival performance of the

entire sequence of Sequenze, a decade ago.

Durran played it strongly, alertly, but sounded equally at home in the

nocturnal sweetness of her former teacher's beloved Faure and in the

bittersweet side of Bartok, as represented by An Evening at the Village,

played with touching nostalgia. Two Chopin waltzes (Stuart would have

preferred the moodier mazurkas) and a Mozart sonata needed more finesse

and freedom of expression -- a quality joyfully present, however, in her

Gershwin encore.