There is a historical stereotype when it comes to purveyors of pianistic virtuosity: the Lisztian showman complete with unkempt hair, smouldering eyes and an entourage of (mostly female) admirers. Sir Stephen Hough adopts a much lower profile, preferring to let his fingers do the talking. The result was a recital that at times neared perfection, making the most of Hough’s characteristic precision of touch and clarity of articulation.

Sir Stephen Hough

© Sim Canetty-Clarke

The two main pillars of the programme’s structure were large-scale masterpieces of the 1830s and 40s, Schumann’s Fantasie in C major and Chopin’s Piano Sonata no. 3 in B minor. In the former, Schumann’s debt to Beethoven is at its most evident, and Hough emphasised its heroic quality, notably in the first two movements. The second, a depiction of Schumann’s ‘League of David’ marching against the Philistines, emerged radiant and confident, Hough making light of the increasingly wider pianistic leaps as the movement neared its end. In contrast, the finale contrived to be both tender and dignified at the same time, sustained in Hough’s hands with total conviction. 

If Chopin’s last sonata fell a little shorter of this standard, it was perhaps because the second movement’s flurry of notes came at the expense of the sort of clarity evident elsewhere in the concert, and the finale’s (admittedly daunting) virtuosity brought with it the occasional pianistic slip. Still, the Largo was magical, Hough drawing out the song-like lyricism of this nocturne by any other name in ways that made one forget that the piano is actually a percussion instrument.

However, it was not the major works but the miniatures that surrounded them that made this recital so impressive. The centrepiece was a composition by Hough himself, his tiny Sonatina Nostalgica, paying homage to his youth and the locations around Lymm in Cheshire where he grew up. Its pastoral idiom echoed the sound world of John Ireland or York Bowen. The slow movement, The Bench by the Dam, came across most touchingly, depicting as it does the memorial erected by Hough next to the village lake in memory of his deceased parents. The work, gentle and understated, was played with an intimacy that made it seem like we were eavesdropping on private thoughts.

The concert opened with three short pieces by Cécile Chaminade, the sort of works that Hough has championed throughout his career. It would be damning them with faint praise to call them a superior kind of salon music. What Hough made his listeners realise is that greatness is not a matter of scale so much as fully-achieved intention. We began with Automne, one of Chaminade’s Op.35 Concert Studies and Hough was utterly beguiling in both the initial establishment of a nostalgic mood and then the sudden shift into the wildness of the con fuoco middle section. Autrefois (from Six Humorous Pieces, Op.87), raised pastiche to a higher art form, with its playful echoes of 18th-century harpsichord music.

In the end, though, nothing told the audience more about Hough’s perspective on performing than his two, utterly contrasting encores. First, Schumann’s Vogel als Prophet (from Waldszenen) compelled his audience to listen with rapt attention as he controlled its mysterious rising and falling arpeggios before ending, as it were, in mid-breath. And, from the sublime to something else entirely, what Liszt might have called a ‘Grand Paraphrase on a Theme by Sherman and Sherman’, but which the audience immediately recognised as Hough’s own arrangement of