He’s the piano man

ACCLAIMED for countless recordings and laden with awards, including a $500,000 MacArthur “genius” grant, 54-year-old Stephen Hough is the undisputed top dog among British concert pianists. He is even more sought-after in America, where he has been touring for much of this year. In Britain this month he is due to play Liszt, Schubert and Franck at the Edinburgh festival and Rachmaninov’s “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini” in his 25th appearance at the BBC Proms in London.

There are reserves of power in Mr Hough’s touch, and an ingrained refinement; his self-composed encores usually dissipate with sly comedy the high seriousness of his art. Elegantly at ease with himself, he is a performer with whom audiences also feel easy.

Mr Hough was born and brought up near Liverpool. The £5 ($6.70) second-hand piano his parents bought him was all he needed to start honing the talent which led him, via the Royal Northern College of Music, to win the Naumberg international piano competition in New York when he was 21. That win signalled the start of a relationship with America which has grown steadily closer ever since.

Most great pianists have a personal style, but Mr Hough’s playing, though magisterial, is not easily characterised. With Vladimir Horowitz or Sviatoslav Richter, Martha Argerich or Mitsuko Uchida, you soon know who you are listening to. And although the fastidiously eccentric Shura Cherkassky, an American pianist with a virtuoso technique, named Mr Hough as his natural successor, the Englishman’s style is far more complex. What sets him apart is the exceptional breadth of his repertoire, as well as the technical finesse and idiomatic authority he brings to every piece he plays. None of the heavily promoted younger pianists playing today can match this combination; among the older ones, Evgeny Kissin—now a 44-year-old eminence grise—is the only one who does.

Mr Hough programmes his repertoire by creative juxtaposition. For a recital at Alice Tully Hall in 2014, he began with Schoenberg’s vestigial “Six Little Pieces”, then moved on via progressively longer works by Richard Strauss, Wagner, Bruckner and Brahms, to climax with Liszt’s gigantic B minor sonata. This programme, he explained, was a way of asking how much could be said in how little time.

Meanwhile, by performing and recording the forgotten concertos of Johann Nepomuk Hummel (overshadowed in life by Mozart and Beethoven) and of Franz Xaver Scharwenka (overshadowed by Tchaikovsky), he has induced other pianists to take them up. He has also devotedly championed the elusive miniatures of Federico Mompou, which he describes as “the music of evaporation”.

The other way in which he has expanded his repertoire is by composition. In his pieces for solo piano and chamber ensemble, this means an ongoing wrestle with the question overarching all contemporary classical music: how to deal with the division between tonal and atonal? Mr Hough’s flip description of his own music is “tonal with a twist”, but there is nothing flip about his analysis of the revolution ushered in by Schoenberg.

Traditional tonality works by creating and resolving tensions—“placing markers along the way, paths to return home”, Mr Hough says. “Conversely the 12-note system ensures that all roads are equal, that no note is more important than any other…a nomadic, circular path where home is the journey itself.” This system became the basis for a cramping orthodoxy which still has adherents. Mr Hough’s Piano Sonata III (Trinitas) is an ingenious experiment designed to undermine that system by taking it to its logical conclusion. “I want music to move me,” he says, “and I don’t think it can do that without at least a link to tonality. It’s the tug between atonal and tonal which makes music poignant.”

Mr Hough is also a prize-winning poet and paints in a boldly Abstract Expressionist style. He has just finished writing his first novel, about a priest who has lost his faith and is being blackmailed, an exercise that allowed him to explore his own life, though he says the book is in no way autobiographical.

That is an important disclaimer, because Mr Hough is a gay Roman Catholic. He has long felt drawn to the priesthood; the two masses he has composed and his book on devotional readings, “The Bible as Prayer”, are commentaries on his belief. At the Wigmore Hall in October, Jacques Imbrailo, a baritone, will sing the premiere of “Dappled Things”, Mr Hough’s new song-cycle on poems by Oscar Wilde and Gerard Manley Hopkins. These poets were linked, he believes, by sexual orientation and a common aesthetic. Beneath its urbane surface all Mr Hough’s music is, in one way or another, a crusade.

^{Stephen Hough is playing at the Edinburgh festival on August 18th; at the Royal Albert Hall in London on August 23rd; at the Helsingborg piano festival in Sweden on September 5th; in Birmingham, Alabama, on September 16th and 17th and at the Wigmore Hall in London on October 28th}