It was with a great deal of anticipation that I attended Monday night’s piano recital by Sir Stephen Hough in the Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, as just a few weeks ago I was fortunate enough to hear Hough deliver a truly majestic reading of Brahms’ mighty Piano Concerto No 1 in D minor, a performance however that was not aided by the vagaries of the Sydney Opera House acoustic.
British pianist and polymath Hough, who also bears an Australian passport, is a frequent visitor to our shores and so it was no surprise to see a packed-out auditorium for this gathering of “Romantic masterpieces”.
The evening opened with small trio of salon pieces by French composer Cécile Chaminade (1857-1944). The revival of works by previously-neglected female composers of the nineteenth century is one of the bonuses of recent concert programming, although it might be added that the opening work, Automne, has been one work that has kept Chaminade’s name in some sort of public arena. It is a deftly-crafted tripartite étude, lyrical in its outer sections, and more dramatically tempestuous in the middle, and it is no surprise that its popularity has persisted during the last eighty years. From the opening bars it was evident that Hough is a master-pianist, shaping the opening tenor-line melody, simple as it is, with almost heart-rending lyricism. Hough negotiated the knotty technical byways of the central con fuoco with an easy élan, allowing its agitated passion to emerge compellingly. The stately, almost minuet-like opening of the nostalgic Autrefois emerged with diaphanous delicacy, contrasting well with the more fleeting, spinning-wheel-like texture of the central episode.
In 1839, Robert Schumann dedicated his monumental three-movement Fantasie in C major, a work written in homage to Beethoven and one of the most technically demanding works of the nineteenth century, to the undoubted greatest pianist of the day, Franz Liszt. Some fifteen years later, Liszt returned the favour by dedicating his own pianistic magnum opus to Schumann, who by then had been admitted to the sanatorium from which he would never leave. Liszt’s Sonata in B minor is as experimental in terms of structure as was Schumann’s earlier Fantasie. Linking four distinct movements into one gigantic canvas that lasts around thirty minutes with no break presents an unusual challenge for both performer and listener alike. Hough recorded the sonata in 1999 and thus has lived with it for several decades at least, and he brought this lifelong inhabiting of the work to the performance tonight. Long-banished were any technical concerns, enabling the tautly structured musical narrative to unfold with a compelling inexorability that commanded the listener’s attention from go to whoa. From the sotto voce mystery of the opening low-register descending modal scales through to the equally enigmatic pianissimo high-register chords that bring this epic work to a close, Hough was able to navigate the musical peaks and valleys with a compelling sense of line that never flagged and never failed to deliver a thorough sense of musical conviction. The scherzo-like third-section fugue, enthralling with its febrile energy emerged quite logically out of the preceding Andante sostenuto, whose glorious spaciousness provided a sustained sense of repose amidst the dramatic turmoil of the outer sections.
Sir Stephen is also a composer of note; his early arrangements of Rodgers and Hammerstein songs make for dazzlingly virtuosic encores, while his more recent Fanfare Toccata, which then-competition-juror Hough composed as the set work for the 2022 Van Cliburn, is surely one of the finest compulsory pieces ever written for a piano competition, (and there have been a plethora of undeniably ghastly ones).
Tonight, Hough offered his own three movement Sonatina Nostalgica (2019), a work written for English pianist Philip Fowke, who co-incidentally also has an Australian connection, being a prizewinner in the inaugural Sydney International Piano Competition in 1977. It is indeed a nostalgic work and recollects the composers’ impressions of three locations in Limm, Cheshire, where the composer was raised. Its pastoral lyricism is – as Hough mentioned in his informative introduction from the stage – reminiscent of Vaughan Williams, Frank Bridge, Arnold Bax, et al. Reading from the score, Hough delivered a persuasive account of this attractive work that may well enter the repertoire. While largely tonal in language, it weaves frequently in and out of tonal centres,
remaining buoyant, seemingly defying any tonal gravity.
The concluding work of the evening was Chopin’s Sonata No 3 in B minor, the Polish composer’s final essay in such a large-scale format. Hough’s reading struck one as being a largely understated one, eschewing the more overly virtuosic, alpha-male histrionics that one is more accustomed to encountering in performances today. It was no less impactful for that fact however. For Hough’s Chopin was infused with a creative spontaneity and sense of improvisatory wonder that surely would have pleased the composer, whose compositional modus operandi was founded on improvisation at the keyboard. The first three movements of the sonata were characterised by an uncommonly gossamer-like touch, effervescent trills, the discrete pinpointing of unexpected bass-line interest, astonishingly pliable rubato, and mostly notably in the freely flowing third movement, an infinitely nuanced tonal palette. Hough is also one of few pianists who manage to employ the una corda pedal in a manner that befits its design, as a colour-enhancer. It must be added that Hough’s fifty shades of pianissimo were certainly aided and abetted by the MRC’s glorious Steinway D. In the Presto finale Hough underscored the shifting harmonic interest with a duly flexible approach to both tempo and rubato, culminating in a whirlwind of a Coda that brought both the sonata and the evening to a joyous, satiating close.
Photo supplied.
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Glenn Riddle reviewed Stephen Hough’s piano recital, presented as part of the Melbourne Recital Centre’s Ready Your Ears series at the Elisabeth Murdoch Hall on June 2, 2025.
