Stephen Hough

Piano

Home
Reviews
Features
Discography

“Few living pianists manage to combine open-hearted virtuosity with so tangible and unaffected a sense of an inner world beyond the notes.”
(The Arts Desk)

On 1 June 2020, Stephen Hough re-opened Wigmore Hall, performing the UK’s first live classical music concert in a major venue since the nationwide lockdown in March. Later that summer he made his 29^th appearance at the BBC Proms performing Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No.2 with BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra.

Other recent highlights include performances with New York and London Philharmonic orchestras, Wiener Symphoniker, Cleveland and Minnesota orchestras, and the Finnish Radio, Tokyo, Toronto, Singapore, Iceland and City of Birmingham Symphony orchestras. In the 2019/20 season, he spearheaded a five-concert Brahms series at Wigmore Hall, performing with Renaud Capuçon, Steven Isserlis, Michael Collins and the Castalian Quartet. Currently scheduled concerts in 2020/21 include concerto performances with the Philharmonia, London Philharmonic, City of Birmingham Symphony and Royal Liverpool Philharmonic orchestras, NDR Radiophilharmonie Hannover, Cincinnati and Atlanta symphony orchestras, Seoul Philharmonic and the National Symphony Orchestra, Taiwan.

Stephen Hough - Chopin Saved My Life © Oxford Film and Television

Hough was appointed CBE in the 2014 New Year’s Honours. A laureate of the MacArthur Fellowship and Royal Philharmonic Society, his extensive discography of over 60 CDs has garnered international accolades including the Diapason d’Or de l’Année and eight Gramophone Awards. His celebrated iPad app The Liszt Sonata was released by Touch Press in 2013. As a composer, he has been commissioned by Wigmore Hall, Musée du Louvre, London’s National Gallery, Westminster Abbey, Westminster Cathedral, the Genesis Foundation, Gilmore International Keyboard Festival, the Walter W. Naumburg Foundation, the Cliburn Foundation, Orquesta Sinfónica de Euskadi and the Berlin Philharmonic Wind Quintet. As an author, his first novel, The Final Retreat, was published by Sylph Editions in March 2018, and his collection of essays Rough Ideas: Reflections on Music and More – winner of the 2020 Royal Philharmonic Society Awards’ Storytelling category and named one of Financial Times’ Book of the Year 2019 – was published by Faber & Faber in August 2019.

Stephen Hough - Chopin: Waltz in A Flat minor (excerpt) © The Telegraph

Stephen Hough - Brahms: Concerto No. 1, 3rd movement (excerpt) © Hyperion

Stephen Hough - Beethoven: Piano Sonata Op.111, 1st movement (excerpt) © Hyperion

“The awe-inspiring range and command of Stephen Hough’s pianism may be a given, but here [in his latest album Vida Breve] he has rarely sounded more imperious […] A hair-raising blend of mastery and imagination characterises the finale’s whirling diablerie [in Chopin’s Funeral March Sonata]. Two encores offer unforgettable solace […] showcasing his liquid honey touch and caressing instinct for nuance and inflection. […] A superb release.”

(Bryce Morrison, International Piano, March 2021)

“A superlative hour of virtuoso music-making from Britain’s top pianist […] Hough is a profound thinker as well as a mercurial performer […] Even in the most grandiose passages of [the Bach-Busoni Chaconne] he found a dark nobility, rising to anger at the mid-point climax, but then conjuring a mood of sublime consolation at that magic moment when Bach turns the tonality from minor to major. His interpretation [of the Schumann Fantasie] was breathtaking in its bravery, the perfect example of why live performance if the lifeblood of music.”

(Richard Morrison, The Times, June 2020)

“Wonderful, almost miraculous […] There isn’t a colour, weight of attack or nuance of phrasing or rhythm that passes him by. Yet every effect, from the decorative flights in the early concertos to the imperial fortissimos of No.5, arrives and departs with natural ease. The most thrilling and moving performance? I’d nominate the kaleidoscopic No.3, blessed here with a particularly fiery Beethoven cadenza and a central largo so tenderly, thoughtfully stroked and probed that my tear ducts opened.”

(Geoff Brown, The Times, May 2020)

“This is a deeply rewarding and distinguished set of the Beethoven piano concertos. Stephen Hough, Hannu Lintu and the excellent FRSO are perceptive and stylish interpreters of the music.”

(John Quinn, MusicWeb International, April 2020)

“Blend imaginative yet learned interpretation, profound sensitivity and poetry, and personal charisma, and you have here one of the finest accounts of Brahms’s late piano works on record, one that stands head and shoulders above most contenders.”

(Michelle Assay, Gramophone Recording of the Month, January 2020)

“The [CD] by Hough of the [Rachmaninov Paganini] Rhapsody is exceptional, as he balances bravura with passions, poetry and a hint of whimsy.”

(BBC Music Magazine (Building a Library – best recording), June 2019)

“The performance of Beethoven Piano Concerto No.3 showed soloist in superb, even remarkable form […] Every note and line he played gave the impression of purpose, that Hough had found musical insight and personal meaning in every moment of the score. His approach was not just intellectual but emotional, with uncommon freshness and fire.”

(George Grella, New York Classical Review, February 2019)

“Witty, wistful, extrovert, introspective and cheeky by turn, this is a masterclass in a certain style of piano-playing, and a dream of an album.”

(Jeremy Nicholas, Gramophone, July 2018)

“Each half [of Hough’s Royal Festival Hall recital] brought one of the two sets of Debussy’s Images. What dazzled me the most was this selfless and unshowy pianist’s effortless handling of the aqueous arpeggios in ‘Reflets dans l’eau’, bright and delicate, rippling from his graceful right hand. There were many more chances to savour his featherweight brilliance and acute feeling for Debussy’s explorations of sound, from the meditative moon piece in the second book of Préludes, beautifully handled, to the piscine ballet of ‘Poissons d’or’.”

(Geoff Brown, The Times, April 2018)

“Thunder and lightning – this time from the keyboard – featured earlier in the week (Prom 20), when Stephen Hough gave a powerful and magisterial account of Brahms’s first piano concerto […] Hough took charge and drove the enormous first movement with impressive authority, cementing his position in the front rank of Britain’s pianists today.”

(Stephen Pritchard, The Guardian, August 2017)

“Hough’s impeccable ear for the inner voice, his way with line, the sheer musicality of his approach came through with crystal clarity. He’s truly an exquisite player.”

(Susan Elliott, Musical America, August 2016)

“The man is an intellectual and physical pianistic powerhouse. He raises more issues and questions per piece than almost any pianist I know. He flings out challenges to preconceptions. And he educates with every phrase […] It was all of these things and more in Hough’s mesmerising probe into the heart and soul of [Schubert’s Sonata in A minor]. What we were hearing, in effect, was a masterclass in musical analysis and perception.”

(Michael Tumelty, The Glasgow Herald, August 2016)

“It’s hard not to be a little awestruck by the breadth of Stephen Hough’s passions, to say nothing of his talents. [He] is simply one of the most interesting musicians around.”

(David Weininger, Boston Globe, May 2015)

“Whatever Stephen Hough plays, he either distils its essence or finds something strikingly new to say about it, and so it was with his Debussy and Chopin programme. He delivered La plus que lente with a languid silkiness, hands seeming to sink onto the keys rather than striking them, and with Estampes created exquisite impressionism. To Chopin’s Ballades he brought his particular perfectionism, which resides in the scrupulous shaping of every phrase and weighing of every note.”

(Michael Church, The Independent, April 2015)

“Schumann’s Piano Concerto, with Stephen Hough as soloist, had been a performance of such startling freshness and clarity that one of the most familiar of all 19^th-century piano concertos seemed totally reimagined, with the sweep and vigour supplied by Andris Nelsons and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra as the perfect foil to Hough’s cool brilliance.”

(Andrew Clements, The Guardian, November 2014)