Stephen Hough, Barbican, London: ‘Charmingly odd’

On Twitter Stephen Hough calls himself a “concert pianist, writer of words and music, governor of royal ballet companies, theology, art, poetry, perfume, puddings . . . ” On stage he amply justifies his own description. Well, most of it. Tuesday night’s Barbican recital demonstrated just how much of a polymath he is.

The main attraction was Hough’s world premiere performance of his own Piano Sonata III, Trinitas, a work fuelled by his interest in theology and his Catholicism. Commissioned for the 175th anniversary of the weekly Catholic journal, The Tablet, it attempts to symbolise dogma — or, as Hough’s programme notes put it, “rules that can liberate or enslave”. That’s why it draws on the strictures of serialism and musical number patterning.

If all this sounds austere, the reality is far from it. Hough has constructed a playful piece — charming in its very oddness — that walks us through a tasting menu of styles. For a long stretch it sounds as though Debussy is jostling with the jazz pianist Thelonious Monk. At times it sounds as though a furious child is reaping revenge on the piano. To the whole Hough brings a sprinkling of fairy dust and considerable structural nous: his is an ability to reconcile the most seemingly jarring of effects. On the subject of Catholicism, however, the music says nothing particularly discernible.

The rest of the recital showcased Hough’s talent for distilling a work’s essence. In Schubert’s Piano Sonata in A minor, D784, he conveyed the impression of underlying agitation — even in the velvet-toned second movement. In Franck’s Prélude, Choral et Fugue, he built up a sense of monumentality, boulder by boulder. And in the concluding Liszt offerings — excerpts from Valses oubliées, S215 and Études d’exécution transcendante, S139 — he never allowed technical showmanship to supplant torrid passion.

No time remained, alas, to profile Hough’s fondness for perfumes, nor for royal ballet companies. There were, however, three puddings: Liszt’s Consolation No 3, an extract from Minkus’s Don Quixote and the theme tune from BBC radio’s Desert Island Discs, played with just a hint of a twinkle in the eye.

barbican.org.uk