Themes
As his blog site Cadenza confirms – along with his many published writings – Stephen Hough is not just one of the world’s most admired pianists, and a composer, but also a deeply reflective and well-informed thinker on a wide range of subjects. Naturally his thoughts often arise out of and return to music. Music fascinates him, not just for the challenges and rewards it offers the interpreter, but also for its place in the whole experience of life, and how it is illuminated by the stories of its composers and performers.
Pianist or priest?
A recurring theme in Stephen Hough’s reflections is the religious faith of a serious Catholic, a convert. The Benedictine monk who prepared him for reception into the Catholic church told him he’d played the piano for long enough – it was time to become a priest. But he continued in his vocation as a musician. Hough’s reflections on musical and spiritual issues will be a fascinating part of his conversation in this year’s Stuart Challender Lecture. These may be reflections on God’s responsibility and ours in the creative process. Expect the unexpected – Stephen Hough has said both that there is no direct relation between his musical and his spiritual life, but also that ‘my faith shapes me…and that me plays the piano or composes’. His aunt warned him not to write about religion – it’s a subject that invites controversy – but he did anyway.
Much more than a pianist
Hough is also an inveterate listener and reader, who somehow finds time away from the discipline of a concert pianist’s practice and performance to listen widely to other musicians, and to collect useful information and anecdotes about music. Among the subjects he may touch on are the aesthetics of making recordings, listening to and comparing performances and recordings, performing, musical careers, competitions…and more.
Talking instead of playing
The spoken word is all the more stimulating when it reveals the mind and person who usually speaks to us through making music. Stephen Hough is an especially articulate, penetrating, and thoughtful communicator in words as well as music, and the Stuart Challender Lecture on 18 June will give Sydney concert-goers who have heard him play the opportunity to hear him speak. Even though the audience may be among those very few people on the planet, as Stephen Hough has remarked, who have the slightest clue about or interest in what classical musicians do, they are bound to go away with an expanded and stimulated understanding.
Is he Australian?
This is a good opportunity for Sydney music-lovers to get to know Stephen Hough better. He has dual British and Australian citizenship. A recent recital CD of his ranges with complete conviction from Beethoven’s last piano sonata, through waltzes, to a tribute to Australia: his own recreation of ‘Waltzing Matilda’, making of it the waltz it isn’t. The mind of the artist is there in his playing and composing – to hear him, for once, without the piano, discourse on music and much more is a not-to-be-missed opportunity.