Expect fireworks from his Mendelssohn, and sweet sadness in his own piece influenced by 9/11, when virtuoso pianist Stephen Hough plays in Dublin, writes Arminta Wallace
STEPHEN HOUGH is a musician with a difference. Sure, his CV shows him to have bounded with ease over all the usual kinds of classical hurdles. Finalist in the BBC Young Musician of the Year competition in his 20s; winner of a 2009 Grammy for his most recent Brahms recording with the Takacs Quartet; soloist with the New York Phil, the Berlin Phil; and son on, and so on. He was the first classical artist ever to win a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant of half a million dollars. A recent Guardianarticle named him as one of the world's best living pianists, putting him right up there with Andras Schiff, Murray Perahia, Mitsuko Uchida and Radu Lupu.
But in his spare time the 47-year-old English pianist doesn't exactly veg out in front of the telly. He's the author of a book called The Bible as Prayer, and has published a number of essays on spirituality and sexuality. He's an award-winning poet – oh, and he paints pretty well too. These last two activities he dismisses as hobbies.
“It’s something I enjoy relaxing with, when I’ve finished working,” he says. “But I do like to see connections between the arts. I feel writing music and writing poetry as a kind of overflow of the energy that I have when I’m playing.
“In the bit of painting that I’ve done, I’m interested in colour and texture. I’m very interested in transparency. The piano is an instrument that can easily sound overly thick, and I love to think that I can work with textures – particularly the inner textures inside the melody or the bass line. There is an analogy there with painting; I love paintings where you see colour underneath the colour, and underneath that, more texture and shape. All of those things are related.”
When he comes to Ireland at the end of this month to do a three-city tour with the Irish Chamber Orchestra, he won't just be playing the solo part in two piano concertos;he'll also be conducting the orchestra's performance of his own cello concerto, The Loneliest Wilderness. These activities too – performing, conducting, and composing – he sees as intimately connected.
“The idea of who conducts other people’s music for a living is really a late 19th-century phenomenon,” he says. “In Mendelssohn’s time, conductors were just people who conducted their own music. If he didn’t conduct his symphony himself, who would? It’s the same with composing. There isn’t an example of any instrumentalist, whether violinist, pianist or cellist, before about 1930 who didn’t also compose.”
Hough describes his 15-minute elegy for cello and orchestra as “a very romantic piece” which began life as a song setting in the days after the World Trade Centre attacks. “I actually happened to be at home in New York that day, not quite knowing what was happening in the world, really. So I wrote this song setting based on an incredibly heartbreaking first World War poem in which an army officer looks back, years later, and remembers the young men who died under his command. He was in charge of them, and they died.”
When he was commissioned to write a new piece by the bassoon player of the Halle Orchestra, Hough took the theme and reworked it.
"But I kept thinking, 'Well, this is fine – but it would sound so much better on the cello'," he says. Eventually he gave in, wrote another piece for his friend in the Halle – and gave the concerto to cellist Stephen Isserlis, no less, who liked it so much that he gave The Loneliest Wildernessits first performance. In Ireland the piece will be performed by the principal cellist with the ICO, Juliet Welchman.
THE PROGRAMME ALSO includes music by Mozart and, in the year of the centenary of his birth, Mendelssohn. Mozart’s piano concerto in C, K467, is nowadays generally called the “Elvira Madigan” concerto after a film (ironically, now pretty much forgotten) of that name. How does Hough approach such a well-known – perhaps even over-exposed – piece of music? “For me, every piece I play is as well-known as every other,” he says. “And this one has been close my heart for many years. From an audience point of view, I would encourage people to listen to every piece as a sort of blank canvas. Especially this piece, because we begin with a C major arpeggio. You can’t get more basic than that. It’s the absolute root. If we take music lessons, that’s what we begin with at lesson number one. What I love is how Mozart takes that simplicity in such a subtle and extraordinary direction.”
As for Mendelssohn, he says, expect fireworks from both the G minor piano concerto and the Italian symphony.
“Mendelssohn’s music has this fully alive, fully alert quality – the fingers are flying most of the time, even in the slow movement of the concerto,” he says. “And I think the violinists probably feel that about the symphony as well. It’s a very virtuosic piece to play. I’ve conducted it a couple of times now, and it’s just totally exhilarating to do.”
Fully alive and fully alert: it might be a description of Hough himself. Not content with performing, conducting, composing and painting, he has flung himself wholeheartedly into a music blog on the Daily Telegraph's website.
“I’ve had lots of fun doing that,” he says. “I’ve been writing about all kinds of silly things. Everything from wigs to cake shops.” Ahem. Did he say cake shops? “Absolutely. I took a photo of the window of a wonderful tea-shop in Harrogate called Betty’s. They have these fantastic scones which they call Big Fat Rascals. But I’ve also written about metronome markings, piano rolls and so forth.”
Ah, well, that’s all right then.
Gay and Catholic: a spiritual journey
It’s rare to find a classical musician who is prepared to speak out about personal issues. But as a gay man and a practising Catholic, Stephen Hough says he sees his sexuality, his spirituality and his musical ability as all of a piece – and must express himself accordingly. “To me, spirituality is the everyday stuff which we’re dealing with all the time,” he says. “It’s not going into some ecstatic trance. It’s changing a nappy, or making a meal at the end of a very tiring day.”
As for sexuality, he has summed it up in the past by quoting – mischievously – the Book of Genesis. “Male and female He created them . . . Indeed, and sometimes both in the same person.”
Hough converted to Catholicism in his teens after “wandering in to Mass” at Buckfast Benedictine Abbey in Devon. “My family was horrified, especially my mother’s family, who come from a very large Orange Liverpool base. So much so that my great-grandmother – whom I never met – was actually buried with a portrait of King William of Orange in her coffin. So the fact that I became a Catholic . . . well, you can imagine.”
His spiritual journey has, he says, been an interesting one. “I began by having no doubt at all, and finding myself completely at home in the most traditional form of Catholicism. Over the years I’ve become a little bit more nuanced. So my Catholicism is with a smaller C now than when I was a fervent 18-year-old.”
As a gay man, does he have a problem with the institutional church? “Personally I don’t,” he says. “I suppose if I were refused communion, or excommunicated, then I might have a problem. But so far I’ve been fairly open about it, and I’ve had contact with a number of high-ranking bishops and so on, who don’t seem to have a problem with what I’ve said about it.”
And this despite the current climate in which conservative Christians regard homosexuality as intrinsically evil? “Well, I think the one thing that distinguishes Catholicism from other brands of Christianity is that it’s not just tied to the Bible,” he says. “It’s tied to natural law, and to the world that we live in. Fifty years ago, no one knew what homosexuality was; it was still illegal, and hidden as something shameful. Now, scientific research is showing that it has a place in the animal as well as the human world. So I think the church will be forced to look at it again. I think there will be a big reassessment.”
His own faith has, he says, been strengthened by his exploration of Christian theology, including the theology of doubt. “I haven’t studied theology in any systematic way. I don’t think I’d find certain subjects – canon law, for instance – terribly interesting. But I’m always picking around and finding different things. To me, writers such as Gerard Hughes, who wrote a book called The God of Surprises, show the good side of what Catholicism is about. There’s a tremendous amount of wisdom there. And I like the fact that he’s prepared to show the reader his own doubts. To say that you’re having doubts about God is not losing your faith; it’s actually growing in it.
“That’s incredibly important, because I think some people who have had certain concepts since childhood find it terribly difficult to explore these things. They feel that if they can’t accept the whole package that they were taught at school, then everything’s gone. But it may mean, actually, that they’re coming into greater insights, even the person whose prayer is ‘God, I don’t believe in you’. What a great prayer that is. It’s honest, it’s direct, and I think it’s a step towards having a very mature kind of faith.”
Stephen Hough performs with the Irish Chamber Orchestra at the University Concert Hall, Limerick, on Thursday March 26; at the Curtis Auditorium, Cork, on Fri March 27; at the National Concert Hall, Dublin, on Sun March 29.
