Piano Postcards
Works by Sherman, Chasins, Rachmaninov et al
Stephen Hough (piano)
Hyperion CDA68469 73 mins
A holiday with Hough must be entirely delightful, if his Piano Postcards album is anything to go by. I could just imagine myself sipping a martini in the bar of an elegant hotel while a pianist stylishly muses over ‘Remember Me’ from Disney’s Coco.
I was transported to a peaceful forest by Edward MacDowell’s ‘To a wild rose’ (from his Woodland Sketches), visited Japan at sunset with Kosaku Yamada’s Aka tombo and savoured the dances in Spain in Granados’s ‘Andaluza’. And I enjoyed the séjour in France courtesy of Chaminade, Delibes and tourist Malcolm Williamson.
If a postcard is a snapshot of a place, it can equally capture a mood, a telling observation, a voice. While many of us end up scribbling banalities, there are others who offer ‘profound poetry… wit and whimsy’, suggests Hough. ‘A few words often meaning more than they say, or even intend.’ That’s certainly the case here.
Hough’s beautifully chosen selection of miniatures says far more than one might expect of an encore selection. What could be more profound than the philosophical mystery of Schumann’s ‘Vogel als Prophet’ from Waldszenen, the flutters of wings dispatched with quicksilver magic.
Inspired by the spirit of the Golden Age of pianism, Hough offers us a feast of piano transcriptions, putting paid to the pernicious prejudice that these are a less worthy form of music. His own transcriptions, drawing on musicals and films, are one of this album’s joys, particularly the entertaining three-part Mary Poppins Suite that opens the programme, taking us from the rooftops of London in ‘Chim chim cher-ee’ to the steps of St Paul’s in a tender ‘Feed the Birds’, before souping up ‘Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious’ with superb virtuosity.
