Stephen Hough reviews

Stephen Hough’s Debussy playing at the Royal Festival Hall a few years ago left me dangling blissfully from cloud 30, never mind nine, so anticipation ran high for this album. And its beauties are many and varied.

Vaughan Williams’s Dona nobis pacem is a work that wastes no time cutting to the quick, and nor does this performance of it: in the opening Agnus Dei soprano Sarah Fox is immediately intense and focused, the Colorado Symphony coiled and ready to spring on the explosive tutti that rips forth from the softer textures.

Stephen Hough’s album takes wing in an atmosphere of tension and sombreness. Built around his own Second Piano Sonata, subtitled ‘notturno luminoso’, its programme extends on either side through soundscapes of night by Beethoven, Chopin and Schumann. In this world with its permutations of turbulence, hauntings, nightmare and a more sinister than usual masked ball, anything seems possible except tranquil sleep.

Writing this in the summer heat of the Olympic opening ceremony, I have to remind myself that ‘into each life some rain must fall’. Stephen Hough’s superb and rightly acclaimed series of Saint-Saëns Piano Concertos is notable, among many other qualities, for its rhythmic control. So what happened here?

The individual items on this disc gave me almost unalloyed pleasure. Stephen Hough is one of the UK's most thoughtful and interesting pianists. The Mendelssohn Variations come over as truly 'sérieuses', on a par with anything by his friend Schumann, thanks to Hough's vivid characterisation and dramatic flair.