Stephen Hough has been a fixture on Planet Piano for years, but there is nothing to take for granted in the completeness and freshness of his musicianship. Like an alchemist, he both challenges and deepens our perception of everything he touches via a fine triangulation of insight, imagination and wit. His playing is supremely communicative and persuasive, and his technical fluency had a candour that is simply breathtaking, with a variety of touch and sonority delivering an inexhaustible palette of colour, shade and substance, all deployed with finesse and judgment. Watching him perform is like witnessing a conductor or director as much as a pianist at work.
This became immediately apparent as he veered between extrovert passion and introvert poetry in the opening bars of Schumann’s Fantasie, the initial declamation immediately tapering away, keeping his expressive powder dry and giving him more room to manœuvre some beautifully articulated advances and retreats and convincing us of the intensity of Robert’s love for Clara, his future wife. Unusually, the urgency surging through the bravura central March took a while to assert itself, in keeping with Hough’s general avoidance of grandiloquence, which deepened the slow glow of the Finale’s Mahler-like ascent to rapture.
Hough prefaced the Schumann with a group of three miniatures by Cécile Chaminade (1857-1944), the first female composer to be admitted to the order of France’s Légion d’honneur (in 1913). She certainly knew how to charm, but Hough revealed a thread of toughness in the central section of the wistful ‘Automne’, and he herded ‘Les sylvains’ (The fauns) away from whimsy overkill. The Chaminade pieces neatly balanced Hough’s Sonatina Nostalgica (2020, commissioned by Chetham’s School), a brief three-movement glance back at the mystery and memory of place, people and privacy, couched in the idiom of English romantic composers such as Ireland and Finzi, a moment of sweet reverie and restraint that lingered beyond its barely five-minute duration and played with spell-binding affection.
There were moments when Hough’s natural spontaneity had its work cut out in Chopin’s B-minor Sonata, in which form, gesture and eruptive melody don’t dissolve into each other as fluidly as in the Schumann Fantasie. But Hough’s mercurial rubato shaped the poetic surge of the opening Maestoso superbly, and you could only gasp at the intricate voice-leading he sewed into the wildly virtuosic Scherzo. The Largo was a marvel of gentle stasis, music that quietly reflects upon itself, blown away by the powerful, quasi-orchestral Finale.
There were two encores, more reverie from Schumann in ‘Warum?’ from the Opus 12 Fantasiestücke, and then some unabashed showing off in Hough’s spectacular reinvention of the Sherman brothers’ ‘Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious’ from Mary Poppins. Who knew mere hands could do that?
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