Hough: Piano Concerto, Sonatina & Partita Stephen Hough, Hallé Orchestra & Sir Mark Elder

• Stephen Hough (b. 1961): Piano Concerto "The World of Yesterday":
• 1 Hough: Piano Concerto "The World of Yesterday": I. Prelude – Cadenza 06:44
• 2 Hough: Piano Concerto "The World of Yesterday": II. Waltz Variations – 03:43
• 3 Hough: Piano Concerto "The World of Yesterday": III. Tarantella appassionata 10:20
• Sonatina nostalgica:
• 4 Hough: Sonatina nostalgica: I. The Road from Danebank 01:48
• 5 Hough: Sonatina nostalgica: II. The Bench by the Dam 01:26
• 6 Hough: Sonatina nostalgica: III. A Gathering at the Cross 01:44
• Partita:
• 7 Hough: Partita: I. Overture 04:11
• 8 Hough: Partita: II. Capriccio 01:42
• 9 Hough: Partita: III. Canción y danza I 02:02
• 10 Hough: Partita: IV. Canción y danza II – 01:43
• 11 Hough: Partita: V. Toccata 04:28
• Total Runtime 39:51

Info for Hough: Piano Concerto, Sonatina & Partita

The premiere recording of Stephen Hough’s piano concerto, recorded by the pianist with The Hallé under Sir Mark Elder, makes its prompt appearance on vinyl. Its subtitle ‘The world of yesterday’ deliberately places the work in a broader context of the pianist-virtuosi of yesteryear who composed and performed their own piano concertos as they toured the world.

There was a time when to be a pianist and not a composer, however modest, was a rarity. Indeed, in the nineteenth century it would have been almost unthinkable. And the piano concerto form, from Mozart through to Bartók (via Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Liszt, Rachmaninov and Prokofiev), was the public face of such pianist-composers. It was their calling card as they travelled around to play concerts, displaying to audiences both their keyboard skills and their personal, musical voices.

But a twenty-first-century question arises: how does one write a piano concerto in the shadow of so much history and so much genius? There are two traps I think: the risk of regurgitating examples from the past—tired figuration dusted off and redressed for the new season; or else simply inserting the soloist as part of the orchestral texture—a team-player so anxious not to sound derivative that they end up sounding intimidated.

My Piano Concerto began with an email during one of the darker days of the pandemic: would I like to write a score for a movie about a concert pianist writing a piano concerto? As I looked at my blank concert diary, erased and masked, it seemed like a wonderful way to keep me busy. I’d never wanted to write a piano concerto (how to begin?) but the characters of this film gave me a handle: an ageing Austrian baroness and a young American composer in the 1930s. I wrote a waltz theme of Korngoldian decadence for the former, and took the bright white notes of interwar Americana for the other … and I started writing. The movie ended up going in a different direction but I had a thick pile of sketches on my desk, plenty of material for a concert work.

The concerto opens with the two motifs mentioned above—a naive melody played by violins and flutes, and a chain of rising thirds answering it with clarinet and harp. This latter fragment will later become the second movement’s waltz theme. The music slowly begins to blush with richer harmonies and increasing energy, until the solo piano enters to play an extended cadenza. After a while the ragged, splashing virtuosity dissipates and we hear the second motif as a slow, disarmingly sweet-toothed prequel ‘waltz before the waltz’—with a hat-tip to Bill Evans perhaps.

As this piano solo reaches its softest point, the strings sidle in, playing the sixteen-bar theme of the real waltz in its full, decadently seductive form. There follow seven variations where the pianist is mainly accompanist, providing a sparkle of decorative commentary. An eighth variation begins with a cranking-up of tempo until, back in C major, we hear both themes waltzing together, glistening with glockenspiel. A further acceleration tumbles us into the third-movement tarantella. ...

"Hough is the ideal guide......his performance is one of perfectly judged understatement." - BBC Music Magazine.

"What a joy it is to bask in Stephen Hought's musicianship." - The Sunday Times

Sir Stephen Hough, piano Hallé Orchestra
Sir Mark Elder, conductor

Please Note: We offer this album in its native sampling rate of 96 kHz, 24-bit. The provided 192 kHz version was up-sampled and offers no audible value!

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Booklet for Hough: Piano Concerto, Sonatina & Partita