Stephen Hough: ‘So many concert halls are built and don’t sound good, and they’ve had millions spent on them’

Stephen Hough is an all-rounder. As well as being a mesmerising performer, the English pianist is a published composer and has written books about music and the Bible, as well as a memoir and a novel. He’s also the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant”, an honour he shares with composers and performers such as Max Roach, Ornette Coleman, Conlon Nancarrow, Chris Thile, Dawn Upshaw and Meredith Monk. He is back in Dublin this month for his first appearance at the Royal Irish Academy of Music’s new Whyte Recital Hall, as part of its opening festival, which begins on Tuesday.

The venue can make a huge difference to a concert. As a student I performed in an earlier RIAM venue, the Dagg Hall, to give the premiere, with Elizabeth Gaffney and the late George Brew, of a recorder trio by Derek Ball. It was terrifying. We didn’t have the opportunity to rehearse in the hall. And when we stood on stage together for the first time and played, it was as if some giant vacuum had sucked all the sound away from us. We just couldn’t hear each other. Many years later the Czech guitarist Vladimir Mikulka suggested to me, in an interview, that the acoustic of the hall was half of the instrument.

When I get to a hall and it’s really dry, my heart sinks. Because I just think, I’m going to be pushing this ball up a hill for the whole concert

“I think this is absolutely true – and for some instruments more than others. The piano is obviously the biggest instrument in terms of size,” says Hough (forgetting the organ). “But, actually, the sound of course dies away as soon as the note is struck. It’s very easy in a dry hall for the sound to get, like you said, swallowed up like a vacuum. And for it not to project and not have any beauty.” It’s a problem that wind and string players, and of course singers, just don’t have.

“For me, when I get to a hall and it’s really dry, my heart sinks. Because I just think, I’m going to be pushing this ball up a hill for the whole concert. It’s hard to get inspired. Because, as you play one note, whether that note sounds beautiful or not, it leads you to the next and to the next. And it becomes like a snowball, really, of inspiration. After all, we’re all about sounds. And if the sound is beautiful, then that inspires us to do more.”

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When it comes to sustained line, he says, “The whole experience with the piano is just a trick. There’s no legato, scientifically speaking. So everything is in the second and third and fourth notes, and how they relate to the first. If you get that right, then you simulate this extraordinary singing tone.”

“I have had situations when I’ve got to try the piano, and it’s been just awful, and I thought, what can I do? You mustn’t give up. Because something can still be made out of virtually every instrument. And I now quite like that challenge, actually. I’ve played some of the concerts that I’ve been most happy with on instruments that were not ideal. Sometimes things can be too good. The hall’s acoustics can be too beautiful, the piano too beautiful. And then you start to get intimidated, or you start thinking about the wrong sort of things.”

He finds very dull pianos hugely problematic, especially “if you’re playing with an orchestra. If you can’t be heard, then you really might as well not be on stage.”

Equally, difficult instruments can sometimes bring out the best in people. The great Russian pianist Sviatoslav Richter is said to have relished a challenge in a piano.

“Yes, he did. There are some historical recordings of concerts. I’m thinking now of some of Liszt’s Transcendental Etudes that Richter made, live concerts from, I think, the 1950s, somewhere in eastern Europe. The piano sound is very harsh and jangly, and not even perfectly in tune. But they’re such exciting performances that he not only transcends that, but, you think, well, maybe that’s part of what makes them exciting.”

In major venues, players get a choice of pianos. When it comes to concertos, says Hough, “I nearly always will just choose the loudest piano if I’m playing a big concerto in a large hall. When the full orchestra is going in Rachmaninov’s Second, you’re happy if you can be heard. If there’s beauty of sound as well, that’s a bonus. There’s something of the excitement of an instrument riding about the orchestra, I think, which is also part of the whole genre of the concerto.”

We detour into the issue of players cheating by rewriting certain passages to make them easier. He corrects me: it is “to make them more effective”. He does agree that Beethoven wrote some awkward passages on purpose. If you make it easier while keeping all the notes, he says, “You lose something of the struggle. I think Beethoven has written in this tension somehow, the physical tension that’s there.”

I’ve played in some beautiful churches over the years that, strictly speaking, were a bit muddy in sound but still had a beautiful colour

He doesn’t think it’s possible to put into words or prescribe what makes a good hall. “So many halls are built and don’t sound good, and they’ve had millions spent on them. And then, sometimes, the most unlikely places do sound good. I think, basically, that’s a hall that has clarity, that supports the sound with warmth, that acts like a sounding board. That’s what I’m looking for in a hall.

“I’d rather have it too reverberant than not reverberant enough, if I have a choice. I’ve played in some beautiful churches over the years that, strictly speaking, were a bit muddy in sound but still had a beautiful colour. I would rather go with that.”

He likes the National Concert Hall in Dublin and praises recent improvements at Sydney Opera House. “Halls can actually be improved.”

What are his favourite halls apart from the Wigmore, where Whyte Recital Hall’s imminent concert series originates? “St David’s Hall, in Cardiff, and Nottingham Royal Concert Hall are two of the best [in Britain], purely for acoustical reasons.” He then adds the Concertgebouw, in Amsterdam (in spite of the notoriously long stairway to the stage being in full public view); Severance Hall, in Cleveland; Carnegie Hall, in New York (for the magic that is part of its history); and the Royal Albert Hall, in London (for its atmosphere and the way “you can hear the softest sound, but what you do lose is mezzo-forte to forte range”). He adds, about another London venue, “I actually like the Festival Hall, though it has its critics.”

Things you mightn’t think about that can affect performances include the backstage facilities. “At the very least you need your own loo and somewhere to sit. I like the dressingroom to be close to the stage. I don’t know quite why, but I feel more comfortable when I just walk and I’m on stage. I like that feeling of emerging from my cage and being in the ring very quickly. Apart from that ... just a kettle, some tea, bits and pieces like that.” And he likes if it’s possible to meet members of the audience backstage after a concert.

On the other hand, “I don’t like to see the audience very clearly once I start playing. In fact I really try not to have someone sitting right at the end of the piano. Sometimes in a small hall for a recital they can seat people directly in my eye line. That’s not good for me. So I always try and move those seats.”

[ John Gilhooly of Wigmore Hall: ‘I stand in the foyer every night. You learn a lot by just chatting to your public’ ]

He prefers lights to be down in the hall rather than bright, but he also likes to feel “that the audience is close enough to be part of it. There are some halls where they feel very, very distant. And others where you feel this enveloping sense of people being around. I suppose it’s partly to do with the size. These postwar halls, like the Festival Hall [in London] or the Philharmonic Hall, which became David Geffen Hall, in New York, with around 2,000 seats, they are pretty big to try and have that connection. Although then, on the other hand, the Albert Hall” – which has more than 5,000 seats – “does have that connection. I think that’s because it’s sort of in the round and also, at the Proms, you have people standing very, very close to the stage, so there is that connection there.”

And the worst? “The generic form of the lecture theatre in a university that puts on a series, where they’ve just about taken out the white-topped desks and the pull-down projection screen”.

Are there any general reforms he’d like to see? “I think that having a concert and having a meal has to be part of the same thing. Concerts end, it’s too late to eat. It’s too early to eat before. Let’s have wonderful restaurants in the lobbies of our new concert halls, and offer a package for the concert and the meal.”

The Royal Irish Academy of Music’s Wigmore Hall Festival begins at its new Whye Recital Hall on Tuesday, September 5th. Stephen Hough plays Mompou, Debussy, Scriabin, Stephen Hough and Liszt there on Tuesday, September 12th, at 7.30pm