Stephen Hough’s interest in Federico Mompou is longstanding, as evidenced by a 1998 album devoted to the Catalan composer’s music (Hyperion, 9/97). He returned to Mompou with Impresiones íntimas on his ‘Spanish Album’ (Hyperion, 12/06). His latest release consists of all four books of Mompou’s Música callada (‘Silent Music’), 28 tiny pieces – the longest is 3'41", the shortest 44" – that the composer assembled between 1959 and 1967. The title comes from a poem by St John of the Cross, who, with St Teresa of Ávila, is one of the great mystics of the Spanish Counter-Reformation. The relevant stanza from St John’s ‘Spiritual Song’ reads: ‘The tranquil night / at the time of the rising dawn, / the silent music, / the resonant solitude, / the repast that refreshes, and deepens love.’

As Mompou wrote of Música callada, his last works for piano: ‘This music is silent because it is heard in one’s inner self … It is my desire that this music should bring us closer to the warmth of life, and the expression of the human heart, that is always the same and yet constantly changing.’ Far from constituting a cycle, with any unifying or evolving rhythmic, harmonic or textural elements, each of these gnomic utterances seems but a fleeting moment’s concentration. It may be these pieces’ economy of means and sheer evanescence that make them a challenge to both interpreter and listener. There are perhaps two dozen recordings of all or part of the Música callada currently in the catalogue by pianists as diverse as Jenny Lin, Arcadi Volodos, Javier Perianes, Alicia de Larrocha and Mompou himself. Yet listening to these pieces, one must ask whether they’re heard to their best advantage when played as a set, much less the four sets in their entirety.

Happily, Hough’s reading of these miniatures persuasively argues for experiencing them in a series, if not at a single sitting. He brings focus and variety to each of these aural morsels, amply rewarding the concentration required on the part of the listener. Mompou’s folk-inflected idiom, pervaded as it is by Catalan traditions, poses few challenges to 21st-century ears either harmonically or rhythmically. Rather the ear is drawn to discernment of the various manifestations of naivety in this ‘primitivist’ palette. The clarity and simplicity of Hough’s approach allows one to readily perceive the warp and woof of Mompou’s rhetorical loom. Another aspect of Hough’s interpretations that seems more developed than in the readings of many of his colleagues is the air of mysticism with which all four of the books are imbued. Those interested in Spanish musical traditions, as well as aficionados of the reticent but never less than sincere Mompou, will surely be grateful.