Steven was born in Lancashire. He gained an Honours Degree in Music from Durham University before going on to study piano accompaniment at the Royal Northern College of Music and to train as a repetiteur and coach at London's National Opera Studio. Steven has worked regularly at Glyndebourne since 1996 on a wide variety of repetoire and with such conductors as Jurowiski, Mackerras, Elder and Belohavek. He has been senior coach there for three years and future plans with them include a new production of The Turn of the Screw, Hansel and Gretel and Rusalka. Steven was senior coach on The Rape of Lucretia at the Royal Opera House; he is also a coach on the Young Artists' Programme there. He has worked for De Nederlands Opera, Amsterdam, on their production of the Ring Cycle and The Cunning Little Vixen; he has worked for Opera North, Opera Ireland, the Opera Festival at Santa Cruz, Tenerife, and he helped prepare The Makropulos Case for both Opera Zuid, Maastricht and the Brooklyn Academy of Music New York. Most recently he was language coach on David McVicar's new production of The Turn of the Screw at the Marinsky Theatre, St Petersburg, conducted by Valery Gergiev. This was the first staging in St. Petersburg of Britten's opera by an exclusively Russian cast.