Stephen Hough is great company, whether as pianist (both in concert or in his vast recorded catalogue, with a slew of Gramophone Awards to his name), composer or writer (memoirist, novelist and essayist), or merely as a dining companion. Behind a deceptively formal exterior – he sports a jacket and tie for a Saturday afternoon lunch at a brasserie in St John’s Wood in London – he sparkles with forensic and often wicked observations, and a very focused, and fluently expressed, take on life. He’s someone, in short, who seems to have found a perfect work-life balance, and because he’s a seasoned professional, he manages an astoundingly busy schedule with apparently effortless ease.

He recently returned from China and Taiwan (a concert tour followed by a Christmas break), nipped off to Madrid for a recital, is at home for four days before going back to Spain for a couple of Grieg Piano Concerto performances, and then he’s off on a lengthy US tour. On the itinerary are Miami, Fort Worth, St Louis and San Francisco with his current solo programme (Chaminade miniatures, the Liszt Sonata, his own Sonatina nostalgica and Chopin’s B minor Sonata), topped off by Grieg’s Concerto in Denver, the Mendelssohn First Concerto and his own Piano Concerto in Burlington, and then a trio of concerts (one of them in Toronto) featuring his String Quartet and the Brahms Piano Quintet with the Takács Quartet. Then it’s back to the UK for more outings of his Piano Concerto with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra and Mark Wigglesworth. It is his Piano Concerto, The World of Yesterday (2023; recorded live by Hyperion last May, and just released), that is the focus of our conversation.

‘I got this email out of the blue’, Hough tells me, tucking into an unctuous-looking soufflé suisse, ‘from a director who was looking for a composer to write a piece for a film he was working on. He wanted a 12-minute piece that they could draw on to use in the film and also score underneath, and so on. And the last scene would be these four minutes with the pianist and orchestra on stage. And the director said, “I want the audience to leap to their feet screaming.”’ So a sort of Warsaw Concerto–Spellbound Concerto kind of thing? ‘That sort of thing, but he was talking about Sibelius and Shostakovich. So it wasn’t just glitzy film music – he wanted something that was rugged and exciting, and full of brass and percussion.’

The timing couldn’t have been better – this was March 2021, when the world had ground to a halt and musicians like Hough, who spend most of their time travelling, were stuck at home. ‘There was nothing in the diary really,’ Hough recalls. ‘So I thought, “Well, yeah, this is the perfect thing to do.” So I had many Zoom meetings with the director in Los Angeles, and then set to work.’

A sketch for what would eventually become Hough’s Piano Concerto, ‘The World of Yesterday’ (photography: courtesy of Stephen Hough)

Just before last Christmas, producer Andrew Keener sent me the audio files of the concerto, and rather than read about the work (it had already been heard in Utah, Calgary and Manchester – where the Hyperion recording was made live with the Hallé and Sir Mark Elder), I listened completely without context or explanation. I remember saying at the time, ‘Well, if the BBC ever thinks about making a TV adaptation of a Stefan Zweig novel, Stephen Hough’s the guy to write the music.’ It says a lot for Hough’s skill at conjuring up a period – and an atmosphere – that my assumption was spot on, as I discovered on finally reading his programme note, which even mentions Zweig.

Hough tells me the film’s plot. ‘The date is 1932. An Austrian baroness had a sister who’d been a talented composer but who had died young, from suicide, leaving sketches for a piece. So she commissions a young American composer to come over to her castle in the Austrian Alps and complete the piece. She’s going to pay him a lot of money for the commission. So he arrives and she gets him settled, and she’s got a wonderful full-size concert grand for him to work with and all the manuscript paper he needs. So he gets to work, but she doesn’t like his initial ideas. The sister’s sketches, which she had thought were the work of a genius, are actually not very good at all. (That was interesting, as I had to write what would have been the sketches that were a bad version of what was to come.) And then it turns out that there have been quite a few composers before this one that she’s done this to, and they’ve disappeared. So a sort of horror story emerges. There’s a scene where she dances a Charleston with him, a fairly new style of dance at the time. (I had to write a Charleston in the style as well.) In the end, he realises he’s basically imprisoned and escapes with his sketches under his arm, walks over the Alps, finds his way back to the States, and then he writes the piece that he’d been sketching, and it’s premiered a year later. That’s the final scene. But there’s a last image where the baroness walks into the lake and drowns herself.’ I’m already getting images of The Sound of Music, maybe Sunset Boulevard … ‘And Misery!’ Hough adds quickly, with a laugh, referring to the highly disturbing Rob Reiner-directed Stephen King adaptation.

The World of Yesterday is in three movements. ‘I thought the plot was interesting and I liked the idea, so I started sketching. The opening has an Americana theme for the young American composer – I was thinking Aaron Copland, who was active at exactly that time. And then there’s a waltz, which is a sort of Korngold thing for the baroness. We had a lot of Zoom meetings and I sent the director some stuff, and he’d say, “Well, we’d want something to represent this and that.” But then the pandemic started to go away and the dates started coming in. And then the film stalled. So I called my manager and said, “Well, you know, I’ve got all these sketches for a piano concerto, and in fact, I’ve got a 12-minute draft which I’d like to develop further. Do you think we could get some orchestras interested in just making a concert commission out of it?” So they asked around and actually quite quickly we got four orchestras interested. Utah was the first. They came on board and said instantly, “Yes, we want this, and we want the premiere.” And then Donald Runnicles agreed to conduct it. So the whole thing started. Then I went back to the film director and said, “I think I’m going to withdraw from this project now.” He’d already paid me a substantial amount of money, and he said, “Well, look, you can keep the money, but I’d like to keep the option to use it.” And I said, “Well, you know, I’m going to pay you the money back because I think it’s better to have a clean break.” So I paid him the money back, and we left it on very good terms. And so I started writing it as a concert piece, and that’s what we eventually recorded.’

You might be forgiven for thinking that composition is a relatively new strand in Hough’s life – part of a diverse creative output that often earns him the epithet ‘polymath’ in press releases and journalistic profiles – but writing music has always been there. ‘Certainly in my younger years, from the time I began to read music until I was at the Royal Northern College of Music, I was writing a huge amount,’ he explains. ‘Nothing really survives and I don’t even know where it is. It’s probably lost. When I got to the RNCM I found out that I couldn’t continue studying composition – they only allowed you to have one study if you were a pianist. So I kept writing for myself. Some organ pieces survive, as well as a Flute Sonatina. Then when I went to the Juilliard School – exactly the same: if you were a pianist, you couldn’t study another subject. And then I started my professional career, and there just was no time. So it was a combination of no time, not having the encouragement of regular lessons, and also that feeling of, “Well, can I really do this?” Like a lot of people who at some time may be very enthusiastic about writing poetry, and then think, “Oh, I’ve written a lot of rubbish, I’m not going to carry on,” it’s very easy to become discouraged. I mean, one word from someone that you respect suggesting maybe it’s not very good and – for me, anyway – that just kills it completely. So, for years, I kind of never thought about it.’

He would write little encore pieces, though, often based on songs or classic show tunes, and it was the composer John Corigliano who, hearing Hough’s confection on Rodgers’s Carousel Waltz in the mid-1990s, suggested he write his own music. And, as Hough recalls in his book Enough: Scenes from Childhood (2023), that had the effect of sowing ‘a seed … an orchard’. A glance through the ‘Compositions’ section of his website reveals not just an orchard, but a veritable arboretum, including two settings of the Mass, numerous piano pieces (his ‘Toccatina’ from Suite R-B features among the Grade 8 pieces for the ABRSM piano exam this year), chamber works (including the lovely String Quartet No 1, Les six rencontres, which the Takács Quartet recorded for Hyperion and which, as Hough notes with surprised gratitude, is a work they continue to programme in their concerts), and songs and song-cycles. Many of these works were written for friends, or as little gifts, or for special occasions. ‘It’s been very nice,’ Hough says, ‘because in a way it was never the centre of my professional life, so I’ve never felt the pressure of “What am I going to write next?” or “Where’s the next commission coming from?” – because I’ve just done things as they’ve come in. But now it really is central to my life.’

It’s a question that Hough will no doubt be asked on numerous occasions now that the Piano Concerto is ‘out there’, but how does the ‘creative’ energy of composition differ from the ‘re-creative’ energy of the pianist striding out onto the stage to play the Brahms B flat Piano Concerto? ‘Performing needs a sort of spark. It’s like a match striking, and it happens across all of the arts. You certainly see it with actors. When a great actor is on the stage, and there’s something else happening, you can’t take your eyes off this person, or they only have to say one thing or move one eyebrow … and I think it’s the same with performing musicians. There can be very, very wonderful, efficient, brilliant ones that you’re just bored with or your mind wanders. So I think with the “re-creative”, that’s what you need to bring to the table. It has nothing to do with being an extrovert, even. Think of someone like [Arturo Benedetti] Michelangeli, or even Martha Argerich. She’s an extremely exciting artist, and yet looking at her, you notice that physically she doesn’t move. There are no facial expressions. It’s very economical what she does. So there’s something else, isn’t there? There’s a sort of charisma there that’s hard to define. But when you’re a “creative” artist, it’s a different thing, isn’t it? It’s a different kind of communication. First of all, you’re not doing it in the moment. You’re doing it for someone else or for yourself to do at a later time. With every piece I write – every serious piece, not Mary Poppins’s ‘Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious’! – I want tears in my eyes when I’m writing. I want to feel that the emotion really connects. And I think that’s been true. Whether it brings tears to anyone else, I don’t know; but I have felt that when I’ve been writing. I realise as I get older that music that means something to me always has an emotional connection. And again, I can’t quite put my finger on it. But there are pieces that just … There’s the Transformation scene in Parsifal. I only have to think about it and my eyes start watering. If I can write something that has that kind of an impact on an audience, I’ll be very happy. Of course, with words, it’s easier because you have a double thing going on with the emotions. I did a setting of three Gerard Manley Hopkins poems, and it’s hard not to feel the tragedy in those late sonnets. I felt that very keenly when I was writing the music. The whole thing made me very emotional. But I think with abstract music, it should be there as well.’

Hough was presumably saved from grappling with the usual questions a composer faces when writing a concerto, thanks to the work’s unusual genesis. What is the relationship between soloist and orchestra? Is it confrontational, or comradely? ‘That’s very true. If I’d been asked by Utah simply to write a piano concerto, it would be a completely different piece. It would have been more dark, more craggy. I have in mind the sort of piano concerto that I may do as my second, but this one had to be attractive to a general movie-going audience. And, of course, it also had to be virtuosic in a very particular kind of way, because that was what they wanted for the movie. So it totally would not have happened without that. So I’m very grateful to the director. Even though he was very apologetic that it all fell through, I said, “No, you’ve done the best thing you could have done for me because you gave me this template.” And I think all composers are helped by a template, aren’t they? I mean, for writers too, if you know it has to be about something or has to be a certain number of words, it’s much easier than just hearing, “Oh, write me something.”’

Where ‘Hough the composer’ and ‘Hough the pianist’ came together was in certain technical issues like balance, which he has often experienced in performance. Even a warhorse like the Rachmaninov Second Concerto needs a conductor of great sensitivity to prevent the piano from being swamped, but as Hough points out, Rachmaninov was constantly learning from his experience as soloist – and got it right in the later concertos. ‘It’s interesting when talking about composition and teaching,’ he adds. ‘So many composers have said to me over the years, “You can’t teach composition.” It’s a pair of ears. It’s a mentor at best. It’s very similar to writing, isn’t it? You know, the great writers didn’t go on creative writing courses. I mean, basically, you learn the language, you learn the grammar, and you read and you absorb and you develop your own personality. And I think it’s similar with composing. You need to learn about orchestration and you need to know what the instruments can do and what they can’t do.’

Presumably, having played nearly all the great piano concertos, he has gleaned – from up close – how certain problems can be solved. ‘I think there were some influences pianistically from the Prokofiev Third. In fact, my concerto opens with very much a similar kind of flute–string sound, slow, C major, and it ends also with a similar kind of vibe. I don’t think there’s a lot of Prokofiev as such in there, though, as far as I can tell! The one trap I didn’t want to fall into was just writing Rachmaninov No 5! Many contemporary piano concertos, I think, sound apologetic about their virtuosity, like they don’t want to acknowledge it. They’re so anxious for it not to sound like Rachmaninov that it ends up sounding more like Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie – where the piano is part of the orchestral texture – than like a real piano concerto.’ (We both enthuse about how successful Thomas Adès’s Piano Concerto is in this respect, balancing the virtuoso with the modern.)

Conductors are often great sounding boards for composers when it comes to the ‘midwifery’ of a first performance, and Hough has great respect for those involved in the Piano Concerto’s early outings. ‘In Utah, we had a great assistant conductor, Matthew Straw, a young American. He was really terrific and very supportive. I’d originally scored it for three trumpets, but he said to me, “You know, if it were two trumpets, it would have a much better chance of getting played by mid-level American orchestras because every orchestra has two trumpets on staff.” So I thought, “That’s an interesting idea: do I really need three?” And I went looking through the score and realised, “You know, I really don’t.” In fact, there was one bit where it was much better with just two. So I got rid of a trumpet after the premiere. But there were still other things, even though I thought I’d been very careful about balance. So then I thinned certain things out.’ He digresses – interestingly: ‘I played in the premiere of the Corigliano First Symphony, and there were tweaks happening in the dress rehearsal. He brought the trumpets down an octave in the final section, because it just wasn’t working. So I don’t think there’s any composer who doesn’t revise a bit after a first performance. And sometimes, of course, drastically – think of Sibelius, who was completely rewriting things like the Fifth Symphony.

‘There are a couple of moments – and it was mainly dynamic things – where Donald [Runnicles] had some thoughts. The thing with Mark [Elder] is that he is so prepared. He’d really, really studied it. And that already gives you a wonderful feeling of confidence in a conductor for everything, I think. Actually, Mark is at the height of his powers now. He’s such a brilliant rehearser and musical mind. It’s never routine. There was one bit where I wasn’t sure if the oboes could play a flourish in a high register, so I put them down an octave and he said, “They’ll love it. Put it up.” So we did. And that’s a sort of Mark Elder moment! And with Donald, there was a moment in the second movement (the waltz) where they just played it, and it was kind of fine. But then Donald made this mysterious thing happen, which Mark also does, and it suddenly became a different thing. And I just thought, “Yes, this is what a great conductor does – it’s that ability to create a sound. It’s just an ability to find a grace within the rhythm and then to balance it so that you hear all the strands. And that’s thrilling to hear!’

Stephen Hough performed the premiere of his Piano Concerto with the Utah Symphony under Sir Donald Runnicles at Abravanel Hall in Salt Lake City, January 2024 (photography: Seth Ian Mower Utah Symphony | Utah Opera)

Hough’s Piano Concerto comes first on an all-Hough album. It’s joined by two works for solo piano, both from 2019. Sonatina nostalgica was commissioned by his alma mater Chetham’s School of Music, as a birthday gift for the pianist (and fellow Gordon Green pupil) Philip Fowke. ‘They commissioned it for their summer festival because he went there every year, and it was his 70th birthday, and they wanted a little piece. So I originally wrote what is now the first movement and thought, “Actually, it’d be nice to make a bit more of this.” So it became a little five-minute sonatina that I actually played myself last week in Madrid.’ The piece is an evocation of homesickness for the places of our youth, which in Hough’s case are locations around the village of Lymm, where he grew up. ‘Trying to explain to a Spanish audience – in English – where Lymm in Cheshire is did feel a bit strange!’

The other piece, Partita, was commissioned by the Walter W Naumburg Foundation for its 2017 piano competition winner the Spanish-Dutch pianist Albert Cano Smit (Hough himself was the winner back in 1983). ‘It’s a virtuoso piece that I also play quite a lot. I suppose it’s close in style in some ways to the Piano Concerto. Well, closer than, say, my Third Piano Sonata, which is a 12-note piece which I’m planning to record this year. Hyperion has signed off – at least from the artistic side – a forthcoming album of all four of my piano sonatas.’

There are two other Hyperion albums in the can, a Liszt programme and another of encore pieces including six Walt Disney arrangements, some of them made for Lang Lang, who recorded them as part of a Disney album for DG. ‘Hyperion has been wonderful for me,’ Hough says with evident gratitude. ‘I think everyone was worried when the Universal purchase happened – whether it was just going to be the back catalogue they wanted and then nothing else. But, actually, I’ve had good fortune with it. It’s now not quite the same as picking up the phone to Simon Perry with an idea and him saying, “Well, I’ve got a studio next month, would you like it?” But this project was never questioned by Universal, and I’ve kept Simon in the loop: he’s actually the dedicatee of the Piano Concerto.’