August 2010

[Louis] Langrée conducted the [Mostly Mozart] Festival Orchestra in the final program of the season [...] featuring the splendid British pianist Stephen Hough. The concert opened with Mr. Hough’s articulate, elegant and fresh account of the well-known Concerto No. 21. Mr. Hough wrote his own cadenzas for the concerto — models of how to make an impression through inventive musical touches and playful harmonic adventures, rather than just showing off one’s virtuosity.

After receiving a warm and well-deserved ovation Mr. Hough played a solo encore, a beautifully direct and tender account of Schumann’s “Träumerei.” Schumann was a great Mozart lover, and it’s a Schumann year. So tucking the piece into an all-Mozart program was a fine idea.
New York Times

August 2010

A few months shy of his 49th birthday, Hough has solidified his place as one of today's leading pianists, the kind of meaningful artist who is likely to transcend his time to be remembered when lists are compiled decades from now of the great pianists of the early 21st century.

[Brahms' 1st concerto] is routinely featured on orchestral programs, but there was nothing routine about this involving, high-energy version. Rather than try to impose his will on the music, Hough met this piece very much on its terms, his comfortable, organic interpretation deftly conveying its easy romanticism. Especially notable were his daringly deliberate yet unquestionably effective tempos in his delicate, whispered take on the slow movement.
Denver Post

August 2010

The new friend was pianist Stephen Hough, who will lead another generation of listeners into similar delirium [...] Hough joined [Bramwell] Tovey for an exceptionally poetic and powerful account of Brahms’ First Piano Concerto. Hough didn’t rely on razzle-dazzle to beguile an audience. Instead, he played with quiet, probing lyricism, nevertheless turning up the power whenever it was needed. He proved incapable of routine — yet never indulged in finicky or misjudged statements. He made this familiar music sound newly written. Welcome him back anytime.
Los Angeles Times

August 2010

The [piano] sings beautifully on “Chopin: Late Masterpieces,” Stephen Hough’s new recording for the Hyperion label. “Largo,” “cantabile,” and “sostenuto” are three markings that Chopin appends to the slow movement of the Third Piano Sonata—broad, singing, sustained. They imply that the movement is an homage to bel-canto opera, and in particular to Bellini, whom Chopin knew and admired. Hough’s playing of the opening melody suggests that he has thought hard about how it would sound if it were sung by a soprano: in place of the clean articulation that you find on most recordings, he adopts a free, flowing manner, so that one prominent motif—an eighth note followed by a sixteenth-note triplet—is rendered almost as a four-note turn, with the first note held a little longer than the others. The manner is at once regal and inward, as in Bellini’s “Casta diva.” When Hough reaches a high B, he slows for a moment, as a soprano would, for the sake of both expressivity and caution. I’ve gone through various canonical Chopin recordings—including accounts of the Third Sonata by Alfred Cortot, Dinu Lipatti, and Arthur Rubinstein—and found none on which the melody coalesces into such an acutely vocal shape.

[Hough] is known as a rare kind of visionary virtuoso [and] what I cherish in Hough’s playing is the sense that he is making up the music as he goes, even as he realizes the written score with uncommon precision. In his hands, the introduction to the Largo—a jagged descending figure, in sharp dotted rhythms—comes across not as a portentous announcement but as a sudden thought, a bolt from the blue.
Alex Ross: The New Yorker

July 2010

All eyes and ears Saturday were understandably fixed on Stephen Hough, the pianist who emerged victorious from three rounds with a Brahms concerto and the Cleveland Orchestra [...] Of the few artists truly equal to Brahms' mammoth Piano Concerto No. 1, even fewer bring to it his blend of grandeur, tenderness, and sheer physical strength.

From the beginning, Hough was in charge, driving the tempo amidst a galvanized orchestra and enunciating the composer's boldest declarations with steely intensity. Yet when Brahms turned rhapsodic, the pianist was ready with lyrical sweep and depth. So, too was the horn, who had a prominent solo. Even more combustible was the final Rondo. Besides an aggressive tempo, Hough's performance sustained an element of risk, keeping the orchestra on its toes and listeners on edge.

But it was the Adagio Saturday that revealed what Hough's most fetching side. Unlike the outer movements, his reading of the concerto's core was all about expression and longing.
Cleveland Plain Dealer

June 2010

A longer stretch of quite transcendent mastery, and a continuation of the French theme, were provided by the pianist Stephen Hough [...] The Bach [was] dispatched with spectacular bravura and rock-like (organ-like) sonority [...] and the account of [Chopin's] B minor sonata exemplified that intermingled high intelligence, emotional warmth and monumental virtuosity that is this pianist’s stock in trade.
The Sunday Times

June 2010

Alfred Cortot’s glittering transcription of Bach’s D minor Toccata and Fugue made a surprisingly heavyweight opener; Hough leaving the opening declamations to hang, pealing, in the air [of Lichfield Cathedral]. The effect was stark and ritualistic rather than the expected high-gothic extravaganza.

In César Franck’s tremendous Prelude, Chorale and Fugue, Hough held tight control of Franck’s vaulting structure while still managing to bring out an almost impressionistic range of keyboard colours. The same qualities made his Chopin B minor Sonata a thing of both melting expression and utterly convincing formal grandeur.

And [Stephen Hough] was in the congregation the next morning for the first opportunity to hear his [Missa Mirabilis] complete.

This is the work that was with Hough in 2006 when he survived a near-fatal car crash; but even without that knowledge, its glowing romanticism and joyous sense of spiritual conviction would have made their mark.

With its soaring treble lines, thunderous organ solos and gorgeous, ecstatic dissonances, it reminded this listener above all of Janacék’s Glagolitic Mass. Would it be sacrilege to hope for a concert performance?
Birmingham Post

June 2010

Stephen Hough is the finest British pianist since the late great Clifford Curzon [and] his quality shines through in every bar of two outstanding new Hyperion issues.

Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto is so frequently abused by crash, bang, wallop pianists that it's easy to forget what beautiful music it contains. Hough leaves you in no doubt, playing with a brilliance that conveys delicacy of feeling as well as virtuosity and power. He is hugely helped by his conductor, Osmo Vanska, and the excellent Minnesota Orchestra [...]

No great artist presents the same face every time, and Hough's playing on his Chopin CD is very different; coolly objective with no spray-on romantic excess, but, once again, bringing out the delicacy, as well as the strength, of Chopin's invention. The greater the music here, the more revelatory the playing, especially in a magnificent account of the Polonaise-Fantasie.  This 73-minute recital, carefully laid out to be listened to at a single sitting, concentrates on the late masterpieces. Buying it, and the Tchaikovsky, is a ticket to a pianistic paradise.
The Mail on Sunday (5 stars for both CDs) 

June 2010

Stephen Hough's programme for this Bath Festival recital was a tribute to the Swiss pianist Alfred Cortot. To honour fully such a musical legend requires a comparable mastery, and Hough has it. His slight frame and understated manner belies the physical might of his playing. Yet it is not so much the power that is transfixing as the rigour and penetrating intellect that Hough applies at every level: the listener's attention is immediately caught and nailed to the spot.

Hough opened with his own arrangement of Cortot's transcription of Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565. The thundering weight of the bass line not only conjured the illusion of the organ's pedal notes, but resonated right up through the instrument to maximise the impact of the chromatic harmony. By contrast, the voicing of the fugue was achieved with impeccable clarity. Hough brought the same incisiveness to Franck's Prélude, Chorale and Fugue, its climactic contrapuntal web balancing that of the Bach, but ending in a typically Franckian carillon flourish.

Hough's ability to weight the tone and, simultaneously, use the sustaining pedal to capture and transform the decaying sound was revelatory, nowhere more so than in the three pieces by Fauré that bridged Bach and Franck. In these, Hough created an impression of dappled light and fluctuating shadows while shaping sweeping arcs of melody.

Poetic instinct was a Cortot characteristic and in the second half Hough brought piercing insight to Chopin, the ultimate poet of the piano. In an elegant pairing of the B major Nocturne, Op 62, with the B minor sonata, Op 58, the balance between the Bachian harmony underpinning the structure and Chopin's expressive sensibilities was perfectly calibrated.
The Guardian (5 stars)

May 2010

[...] Stephen Hough’s mercurial, magical solo playing in Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. Hough made a lot of the piece sound as dapper and light-fingered as a Mendelssohn scherzo. Yet somehow, miraculously, he still managed to punch out those spine-chilling Dies Irae quotations like summons from beyond the grave. Superb stuff.
The Times

April 2010

Tchaikovsky Complete Works for Piano & Orchestra on Hyperion Records
The old warhorse (Concerto no. 1) comes up fresh as paint.  Even with 130 alternatives on the market this is an exceptional reading [...] The electrifying pace Hough injects into [its] coda and the Concert Fantasia are suitably exciting, though these are nothing compared to the tumultuous final pages of no. 2 (a tremendous performance).  The audience whoops in amazement. [...] This is a great recording - no doubt about that -  and one which, if there is any justice, will garner any number of awards.
Gramophone Magazine

Hough’s easy virtuosity is sometimes taken for granted in his native country, but he is no mechanical flash merchant, as these brilliantly played but thoughtfully reconsidered interpretations reveal. He achieves the remarkable feat of not making the B flat minor concerto sound remotely hackneyed.
Sunday Times (5 stars)

With Hough at the keys, the First Concerto becomes no warhorse taken for a dutiful trot but a freshly imagined masterpiece bouncing with surprises and invention. Beyond Hough’s crystalline clarity, dash and power, Vänskä displays complete mastery of the music’s architecture, engineering tension particularly well in the finale’s hurly burly.  The Second Concerto, in G major, also flourishes as never before. Oddities of structure and the piano-orchestra balance pretty much vanish under the musicians’ spell.
The Times

Anyone who heard Stephen Hough's barnstorming performances of all the Tchaikovsky piano concertos at last year's Proms will want to own these CDs.  Captured live, they recreate all the raw excitement of those memorable evenings at the Albert Hall.
The Observer

Anyone who heard Hough's performances of the same works at last summer's Proms in London will know what to expect here. His ability to strip off the layers of varnish from a work so that it recaptures much of its startling freshness is remarkable, and his combination of bravura swagger and the most fastidious care with line and texture is utterly convincing.
The Guardian (5 stars)

Though playing the same notes in the same order as everyone else, Hough and Vänskä manage to remap [the First Concerto]. The pianist, startlingly lucid even at breakneck speeds, delivers virtuosity without ego; the conductor sustains tension where most performances go slack; and his arrangement of "None But the Lonely Heart" (borrowed by Stravinsky for "The Fairy's Kiss") is exceptionally poignant.
Star Tribune (Minneapolis)

Guaranteed to set the pulses racing [...] delivering performances that project an exceptionally high level of adrenalin, Hough brings a much greater degree of coherence to the episodic nature of the first movement of the 2nd [Concerto ...], the orchestra responding very incisively to his dynamic and spontaneous playing.
BBC Music Magazine

[In the Second Concerto] as always with Hough, of course, there's breathtaking variety of colour and touch [...] While the finale has plenty of dash and even elegance, there's a consistent sense that we're on the edge - and we seem to vault beyond the bounds of reason entirely as the Concerto hurtles towards its conclusion.  A crushing performance that ought to change the way you think about the piece.
International Record Review

The First Concerto is the inevitable starting point and Hough's take is awe-inspiring.  In fact, you may need to steady yourself during the breakneck opening Allegro and the final pages which erupt in a veritable tornado of notes.  Ecstatic applause from the Minnesota audience lends it all that very special sense of occasion.
New Zealand Herald

December 2009

[This recital] was two hours of the most devastating clarity of pianism I have witnessed. When Hough is in this form he cannot be rivalled [...] His own arrangement of Bach's D minor Toccata and Fugue, conceived for the power and clarity of a modern concert grand piano, sacrificed nothing in its majesty. Hough’s French collection lifted the veil from Fauré and revealed César Franck's Prelude, Chorale and Fugue as a more precise, powerful and dramatic piece than I have realised. And his rivetingly dramatic Chopin playing, especially in the B minor Sonata, was as lucid intellectually as it was devoid of misty sentiment. A colossal recital.
The Herald (Glasgow)

November 2009

Soloist Stephen Hough played [Mendelssohn's picno concerto no. 1] with focus, technical dexterity and delicacy, bringing out the work’s sense of joy in a really brilliant performance. Recognizing that, the audience rewarded him with a warm ovation. Hough returned the favor with an encore. Rather than something big and fiery, he chose the quiet, understated “Venetian Gondola Song” from Mendelssohn’s “Songs Without Words.”
St. Louis Post-Dispatch

October 2009

Stephen Hough's performance of the Liszt Piano Sonata in B minor [on Hyperion Records CDA67085] sets him apart from the rest. Utilizing all of his capabilities as a pianist, he expertly conveys the changing character of the music. At times, it sounds as if he's playing several different pianos as he moves from a brilliant tone to a broader sound and back again. This piece requires not only the technical ability to play difficult music over a long period of time, but also the intellectual grasp to pull the threads together. Hough possesses both.
Ted Libbey NPR

Though he's a brilliant pianist, Hough's style -- so light and fleet-fingered -- isn't what we usually hear -- or expect to hear -- in Tchaikovsky, especially in a burly, massive opus like the famous Piano Concerto No. 1 [...] and yet, as it turned out, this was an extremely effective performance.  Vanska and Hough made an especially persuasive case for their scaled-down, patrician approach, a reading that emphasized clarity, nimbleness and lyricism without any loss of excitement. Through a subtle stretching of phrases, Hough unearthed a welcome vein of melancholy in the slower passages of the first movement, along with a surprising playfulness in the cadenzas. And without pounding, he took the big double-octave roulades with fearless energy and a daredevil speed that surely rivaled that of the two classic Horowitz-Toscanini recordings.
Minneapolis Star Tribune

Stephen Hough took the most popular piano piece from Peter Tchaikovsky's canon — his First Concerto — and created something more anxious, agitated and ultimately enlightening than you'll customarily encounter. Hough displayed the same pristine technique and interpretive depth that local audiences have enjoyed during his recent visits. Throw in the spine-tingling nature of the First Concerto, and the result was a lengthy standing ovation that eventually inspired an encore [...] Tchaikovsky seldom has sounded so conflicted [...] an intriguing performance from beginning to end.
Pioneer Press (St. Paul)

September 2009

Hough and the Minnesota Orchestra dispatched Tchaikovsky's Concert Fantasia with stunning virtuosity, vigorously elevating a piece that languishes in symphonic obscurity [...] This is a prodigious piece of music that shows off Hough's fierce strength, his disciplined articulation, delicate clarity, dexterity and passion.
Minneapolis Star Tribune

[The] Concert Fantasia proved a tremendously successful collaboration. Because so much of the work is given over to lengthy solo piano passages, Hough was able to dictate the mood. Or more accurately the moods, for he played up the work's emotional contrasts, thundering here, sighing there, delicately dancing, but always with the utmost precision and unimpeachable technique.
Pioneer Press (St. Paul MN)

Shorter and sunnier than the two main Tchaikovsky piano concertos, [the Concert Fantasia] nevertheless requires greater virtuosity than either, and Hough played with barnstorming brilliance.
Sunday Telegraph

August 2009

Stephen Hough, called upon for the wayward Concert Fantasia (last heard at the Proms in 1903), offered crystal clarity, a springing gait and radiant virtuosity.
The Times

Undoubtedly, these terrific youngsters [of the NYO] will have learned a great deal about playing the romantic repertoire by simply listening to Stephen Hough. In Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No.1 he was the epitome of a “golden age” virtuoso with his balletic elegance and dazzling rhythmic reflexes and it would have been impossible for some of that not to have rubbed off. There was an extraordinary moment mid-way through the first movement where the mounting intensity of the NYO strings seemed quite literally to transfer energy into Hough’s hands with fusillades of double-octaves powering us into the first cadenza [...]

But then came the pellucid dreaminess of the slow movement where Hough’s exquisite rubati were truly mirrored in the sound he made and his sensibility seemed to proliferate through each and every NYO player. It was a performance of properly dramatic extremes, of quicksilver brilliance and of thunderous excitement from Hough himself. But he pointedly chose an encore which reflected quietly on Tchaikovsky’s troubled soul - a transcription of the song “None But The Lonely Heart” - and that was infinitely telling.
The Independent

The piano concerto brought Stephen Hough to the crest of his Tchaikovsky series, and once again demonstrated his ability to strip the Romantic Russian repertoire of its sentimental gloop without sacrificing its thunder. In the most fevered moments, Hough erupted, mixing unrestrained passion with purposefulness; yet it was in the quietest exchanges with the orchestra that he drew us in most irresistibly. The encore – his own, hushed solo arrangement of Tchaikovsky's None But the Lonely Heart – was a gem.
The Guardian

But then the pianist Stephen Hough came on to play Tchaikovsky’s Second Piano Concerto, whose main raison d’être seems to be to challenge the pianist to play more notes and at greater velocity than is humanly possible. But, improbably, Hough pulled it off, playing not just fast but with refined delicacy and in the romping finale with delicious insouciance.
Financial Times

July 2009

Then Hough and Nelsons launched into the Tchaikovsky [2nd], an unbalanced but enthralling score with its ambitious, extended first movement, poetic but uneven middle, and feverishly jaunty finale. The piano part, and especially the first big cadenza, is so fast, complex and ferociously difficult that you feared Hough - or the instrument he was in brilliant combat with - would combust. But he and the orchestra somehow managed to plunge down the helter-skelter together with perfect grace and companionship, never appearing to falter. Afterwards, Hough played a slinky solo miniature by Mompou, as if offering us all a pianissimo tranquilliser.
The Observer

Hough himself is an indefatigable champion of this eccentric and excessive work [Tchaikovsky 2nd], and he makes you believe in every mad note of it. Cracking power and precision from both soloist and orchestra for the grand Russian manner of the opening — then handfuls of notes, spinning manically from the keyboard.
The Times

It is hard to imagine another pianist sounding more eloquent in [Tchaikovsky 2nd]. Hough seems able to tease out filigree detail and glittering colours even when a composer is throwing fistfuls of notes at him – a signal achievement.
Financial Times

Hough seized hold of the charger of a first-movement cadenza, galloping as though he were in competition with the Olympic javelin shuttle. Indeed, there was more than a whiff of the superhuman in the closing moments of the concerto.
London Evening Standard

Hough played it [Tchaikovsky 3rd] stunningly; he sounded as if he was using at least 15 fingers and a couple of toes in the heroic cadenza.
The Times

The torso of the unfinished 3rd Concerto brought [Hough's] characteristic deftness of rhythm and a wonderful sense of “golden age” pianism with the second subject of the piece relaxing into a beguiling range of rubatos in the span of only a handful of bars. Sound and phrasing were beautifully reconciled.
The Independent

June 2009

Hough's style of virtuosity is lean, brisk and free, mixing pointed dryness with languorous change of tempo, punctuated with moments of surprising vehemence, always underscored with bristling intellectual energy. The last movement replaced the riveting flexible-wristed virtuosity of the first movement with equally exhilarating quicksilver velocity, etching another unforgettable performance into Sydney's musical memory.
Sydney Morning Herald

Stephen Hough is renowned for his advocacy of the romantic piano repertoire. It is easy to see why. His account of Tchaikovsky's unfathomably neglected second piano concerto was a rewarding fusion of barnstorming brilliance and poetic sensitivity [...] Hough's trademark crystalline articulation and fluid dexterity were in full evidence.

Bracing speeds and pounding fortissimo chords invigorated the work with surging rushes of energy. Typically, Hough infused his high-voltage virtuosity with subtle, sophisticated elegance. His phrasing was often inflected with astutely employed dashes of rubato and tenuto, and he displayed exquisite delicacy in sotto voce passages.
The Australian

June 2009

British pianist Stephen Hough was firmly in command of Tchaikovsky's heroic if sometimes awkward piano writing. We've heard so many fire-breathing virtuosos barnstorm their way through this piece that it was wonderful to hear someone making real music out of it. Hough spurred the torrential chordal passages with rock-solid rhythm, while his rubato always flowed out of a deep understanding of the style.
Chicago Tribune

Is there a more elegant and unflappable pianist than Stephen Hough? In any setting, in any repertoire, the British player can make the greatest concertos of the Romantic tradition full of life and power without even a whiff of vulgarity. And from the first bars of the Tchaikovsky B-flat minor first concerto (complete with evening ambulance-siren obbligato) to the last (complete with return of the ambulance theme), Hough gave the festival a standard that it will surely work diligently and happily to meet over the next 10 weeks.
Chicago Sun-Times

May 2009

Although Tchaikovsky's second concerto isn't as familiar as his first, Hough's 10-digit flurries up and down the keys were filled with the flamboyant showmanship the composer customarily inspires. This was an exceptional performance, particularly during an explosive first-movement cadenza that gave the Steinway a workout, Hough's hands a blur as he struck with speed and precision.

After acting as emotional catalyst for the opening, Hough was a wise and wistful facilitator between violinist Jorja Fleezanis and cellist Anthony Ross in the second movement, then an exuberant dancer in the finale. Audience members responded with their fastest standing ovation in recent memory.
Pioneer Press

February 2009

Not every pianist offers a detailed prospectus of the works he means to play. But then not every pianist is Stephen Hough, who has won awards for his poetry as well as for his  playing, and who regularlyblogs about music, religion, hats and other topics for The Telegraph, the London newspaper. “This recital is about counterpoint — not so much within the pieces (despite the two fugues), but between the pieces,” Mr. Hough wrote in the program for his Carnegie Hall performance, presented before a large, rapt audience on Thursday night. His essay, which identified a Parisian spirit and the great pianist Alfred Cortot as further leitmotifs, indicated a keen, idiosyncratic intellect, elegantly deployed.

His playing confirmed that impression. He opened with Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor (BWV 565) for organ in his own edition of Cortot’s piano arrangement. Dramatic flair, dazzling technique and pinpoint clarity in counterpoint thus established, Mr. Hough shifted gears with Fauré’s mellow, aqueous Nocturne No. 6 in D flat, Impromptu No. 5 in F sharp minor and Barcarolle No. 5 in F sharp. In these, and in the account of Franck’s Prelude, Chorale and Fugue that followed, Mr. Hough’s execution was scrupulous, his lines affectionately molded. But what impressed most was his quietest playing, a hush so bold that its gravitational pull took you deep inside his work.

After intermission Mr. Hough offered a powerful account of Copland’s Piano Variations of 1934, a piece that reflects Copland’s youthful dedication to radical social politics and steely modernity. What Mr. Hough showed, through his incisive touch and sensitivity to dynamics, was that the sweeping prairies and stately arroyos of Copland’s maturity could already be glimpsed past the rivets and girders here, as long as you knew where to squint.
New York Times

January 2009

Hough brought enough detail and focus for everybody in a fascinating, unusual, well-thought and ultimately shattering performance of the Tchaikovsky…Hough was leaving himself somewhere to go, and he went there, all the way. This was ‘contemporary’ Tchaikovsky: informed, that is, by the current revisionist trend-of-thought that there is a lot more substance to the composer than the mere sentiment and sugar so often ascribed to him. There is certainly nothing goopy about Hough's playing: slightly acidulous, if anything, and incisive. His fingerwork outlined strong shapes through a network of crosshatching, with the precision of a fine-tipped pen…The conclusion was a veritable tempest in which the roiling, demonic piano called forth such a storm surge of response from the orchestra as nearly to drown itself out before blasting to a finish. A thrilling performance.
The Washington Post

It’s a wonder the fire alarms didn’t go off at Meyerhoff Symphony Hall Thursday night. The incendiary match-up of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, guest conductor Vasily Petrenko and piano soloist Stephen Hough produced one of the most memorable concerts of the season…Speaking of fast and intense, Tchaikovsky’s overly flogged warhorse headed out of the gate with a refreshing vigor and absence of sentimentality. Hough, the widely admired British pianist, tore into the concerto in a way that may well have horrified some listeners. I think he even managed to outdo speed demon Martha Argerich when it came to octave whirlwinds. Well, I’ve always been of the (probably unsound) mind that nothing can be played too fast — or too slow. But what typically happens when pianists want to rip up this work is that they go for both extremes in one sitting, constantly pulling the tempo every which way to apply an interpretive stamp. Hough would never stoop to that sort of thing. What he did was simply take the concerto out of its mushy romantic nest and treat it like a great work that combines bravura with un-sticky lyricism. The proportions were always sensible, and that made all the difference…the electricity he produced as he charged ahead had an almost giddy effect — I’m sure I wasn’t the only one smiling in the hall…This kind of music-making — unpredictable, risky, fearless — is as rare as it is exciting. It’s what keeps us coming back to concert halls, even to such familiar repertoire as the Tchaikovsky concerto.
The Baltimore Sun

January 2009

If Dudamel hoped to establish his bona fides as an interpreter of the Classical repertory, he couldn't have chosen a more stylish role model and collaborator than Stephen Hough. The British pianist played Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 21 with impeccable grace, wit and style, complete with his own delicious cadenzas.
Chicago Tribune

He and Dudamel had never met until this week's rehearsals, but the encounter seemed one of equals and counterparts. Hough is known for his unusual combination of intellectualism and romanticism, and his partnership with Dudamel in Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 21, K. 467, underlined Dudamel's own remarkable intelligence and the conductor's natural ability to support Hough's experiments in rhythm and balance. I am not sure when I last heard a performance of a Mozart piano concerto that was so interesting. Even in the beloved Andante, Hough reminded us of Mozart's complexity by highlighting the left-hand accompaniment. In a wonderful exchange, Hough seemed to embody wholly natural Latin rhythms while Dudamel gave the orchestra an English clarity.
Chicago Sun Times

December 2008

There must be something in the psychology of British audiences that requires their musical icons to be acquired from abroad. Otherwise Hough would already be acclaimed as a national treasure, for over the past decade or so he has consistently produced performances that place him in the top flight of international pianists. Perhaps the variety of his programming tells against him, too - as well as Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert, he also revels in the flashy late-Romantic repertoire, and includes salon pieces in his recitals, all of it delivered with immaculate polish and unerring style.
The Guardian

December 2008

Hough was as cool and controlled as the music was dramatic and difficult, his demeanor composed as his hands moved in a keyboard-mashing blur. True, part of the thrill was in watching a stunning athletic feat--and this was like an entire season of Michael Jordan in his prime condensed into half an hour--but his musicality and intellect were as much a part of the performance.
The Oregonian

April 2008

There are all too few pianists with the equivalent of Hough's three Michelin stars … Opening with two of Mozart's solo masterpieces, the ear is welcomed into an intimate, pellucid sound world with a sophisticated grading of dynamics … [Liszt-Busoni Fantasy] provides a hair-raising bravura display that deserves to be heard more often. At least, when played like this.
The Gramophone

April 2008

A bold and dramatic account of Mozart's K475 C minor Fantasia opens this memorable and imaginatively devised recital. While emphasising the prophetically romantic nature of the music, Stephen Hough takes great care not to overplay its more forceful passages … The final party piece, the Liszt/Busoni Fantasia on themes from The Marriage of Figaro, is a sure-fire crowd-pleaser given an exhilarating performance guaranteed to bring the house down.
BBC Music Magazine

March 2008

Here’s another winning, imaginatively conceived disc from Britain’s finest pianist…It is unexpected and delightful programme-building. Prized for his pianism, Hough is also a superb Mozartian. He lends these Fantasias an almost Beethovenian weight and depth of expression, as if to say they signal the beginning of the Romantic tradition…Hough’s piece juxtaposes musings on two of Mozart’s earliest piano works, K1 and K33, and a late song, Longing for Spring, which quotes the finale to the Piano Concerto, K595. Hough’s playing is dazzling throughout.
The Sunday Times

March 2008

Serious for this extraordinary pianist appears to mean sober, dignified and energetic. Mr. Hough’s Beethoven and Mendelssohn push forward. No lilies are gilded. Faith is placed in what the music says; lingering editorial comment is secondary. Mr. Hough can be delicate and he can thunder, and he is responsive to how harmonic gravitational pull affects phrases.
New York Times

March 2008

In a typically well-made progamme, the compelling British pianist springboards off Mozart into a series of tributes. The virtuosic challenges are handled with liquid clarity and intelligent expression. Mesmerising in the Mozart, the transition to a more modern take comes surprisingly fluently.
The Times

February 2008

It makes the perfect finale to a disc that shows what a wonderfully versatile and agile-minded pianist he is, unquestionably the finest we've got in this country.
The Guardian

February 2008

A scintillating exploration of Mozartian style in tribute works by other composers. Easily the most attractive is by Stephen Hough himself, who takes three small pieces and reinvents them in the style of Poulenc. The result is a seductive, spicy and totally original addition to the genre, and a nice counterweight to the Liszt-Busoni Figaro fantasia, which the prodigiously talented Hough plays with his trademark intensity.
The Observer

February 2008

He is a pure, honest musician, and one of the best pianists in the world. He is the kind of pianist — very rare — who contains all pianists. He is a thunderous and dazzling virtuoso; and he is a poet, a miniaturist. He is both a Liszt player and a Mozart player — utterly appropriate in both. He has Horowitz in him, and also Myra Hess. (Actually, those two pianists contained all elements too.) Mr. Hough, in brief, is a complete pianist. He does not have much company…In the Brahms's D-minor, Mr. Hough called on his completeness: He was titanic and angelic, as the music required. In almost every note and phrase he played, there was judgment. The second movement had all the spirituality imbedded in it. And Mr. Jurowski and the Russian National Orchestra made excellent, committed partners in Brahms. They used head and heart in the right doses…This was a first-class performance of a great concerto. The audience got its money's worth, and then some.
The New York Sun

January 2008

The first half, made up of three works heavily dependent on variation form, emphasised the intensely thoughtful side of [Hough’s] artistry, while the second, a concise survey of the waltz in piano literature, showed off his effervescent bravura brilliance, which can lavish as much care on the slenderest miniature as on the most highly wrought sonata form. Both were totally convincing…The lucidity of his playing - crystalline textures, crisp articulation - finds a perfect counterpart in a musical understanding that fits every detail into the overall scheme and never even momentarily loses sight of where the music is heading. The unforced naturalness with which the second movement of Op 111 unfurled, the metrical modulations between the variations seamlessly managed, showed off that understanding to perfection…Hough's waltz sequence began at the beginning…The playing was extrovert and ardently lyrical by turns. The steely edge that parts of the Weber showpiece demand returned for a dazzling account of the Mephisto Waltz, while the melancholy pervading Chopin Op 64 No 2 was as perfectly caught as the sentimentality of Saint-Saëns's Valse Nonchalante and Chabrier's Feuillet d'Album. Hough passed the tests he set himself consummately.
The Guardian

November 2007

For his D minor Concerto Brahms is said to have drawn on his friend Robert Schumann's decline into madness when he was suffering from hallucinations. And one can scarcely imagine a better performance than that provided by the pianist Stephen Hough in the Funkhaus (Broadcasting House) to illustrate this. This Englishman with his hugely impressive crystalline sound was constantly seeking to extend the boundaries of musical expression. He played the powerful first theme with its sequences of trills and accentuated emphases with such intensity that one was left with their piercing, wrenching tone ringing in one's ears. Such was Hough's uncompromisingly breakneck speed that the mighty octave sequences at the beginning of the development and later in the final stretta became a veritable riot of sound.
Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung

May 2007

In a word, Hough's artistic talent is a gift that can't be created - it just is. And an evening in his presence at the piano is nothing short of magic.
The Denver Post

May 2007

If a music critic's only real job is to bring people to beauty, then let me share Stephen Hough's performance of Brahms' Second Piano Concerto…Hough offered a never-to-be-forgotten event that was both humbling and exhilarating, one of the finest hours of music all season. A MacArthur "genius" and a favorite of piano fans around the world, Hough plays with a quality of stillness that illuminates the music from within. His attack is so pure, the piano itself seems to speak…His sound is lean and purposeful, exquisite in its softness, but electrifying in loud passages and rounded in climaxes. You'd think that a large hall would require larger musical gestures, but Hough did the opposite, closing the distance between performer and listener. We came to him, not the other way around, and that is part of his magic.
The Oregonian

April 2007

Stephen Hough straddles the border between pianism and prestidigitation, playing with a finesse that shouldn't be achievable at the speeds he favors. But Hough is more than his fingers. A composer and a writer with a theological bent, he's the sort of reflective musician we can never have too many of.
Star Tribune

March 2007

The pianist and composer Stephen Hough is known both for his intellectual grasp of his repertory, which shows itself in the clean precision of his playing, and for the warmth and emotion of his interpretations of the great Romantic pieces. He’s also celebrated for his championing of new music and his rediscovery of neglected composers.
The Wall Street Journal Europe

March 2007

Hough’s recording of the four Rachmaninov Piano Concertos drew awards of the highest order…In Hough’s measured, unshowy opening, accompanied by the silkiest of instrumental ensembles, the long opening melody soared. The teasing inner voices of the slow movement unfolded with an almost improvisatory quality, and the dazzling third movement was exhilarating without being overblown.
The Independent

March 2007

Talk about multi-talented: when Stephen Hough revisits his native city as artist-in-residence at the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra next week, the range of what he will do is staggering…Hough, it turns out, was twice on the verge of becoming a Catholic priest, but, luckily for us, bishops and priests argued him out of it: lots of folk can sing plainchant, but only one in a million plays Rachmaninov like him.
The Independent

January 2007

Stephen Hough is, by general consent, the finest concert pianist Britain has produced for decades. He is the only soloist to have won Gramophone’s Record of the Year twice and the only classical musician ever awarded a $500,000 ‘genius fellowship’ by the MacArthur Foundation. Time magazine describes him as ‘a totally unsnobby egghead’ with ‘enough technique for two ordinary pianists’ – perhaps because he practises twice as hard as most of his rivals, spending hours at a time working out the precise angle and the nanosecond at which to apply the pedal in a single bar of a Beethoven sonata.
The Sunday Telegraph

December 2006

The sparkle and sensitivity of Stephen Hough’s piano playing is lavished on a typically imaginative cross-section of music inspired by Spain. There’s the half-light beauty of Mompou, a glittering Soler sonata, neglected Granados, superb Albéniz and vivid musings from the French neighbours, Ravel and Debussy. Showy trifles end the disc, but there’s nothing superficial about the performances. The perfect Christmas present.
The Times

December 2006

I cannot imagine many piano lovers failing to fall for this delectable and all-too-brief collection of impressions, portraits and postcards. If you are not drawn to the imaginative programme of the familiar, the brand new and the entirely unknown, then the elegant, eloquent playing of this master pianist will surely seduce you.
The Gramophone

December 2006

Hough is one of Britain's best-kept cultural secrets; a pianist of such sophistication he will, I suspect, by the end of his career be able to be mentioned in the same breath as the few great British pianists of the past, such as Clifford Curzon and Solomon.
The Mail on Sunday

November 2006

Stephen Hough as always been something of a free spirit among pianists, combining new thinking in the greats with a penchant for the outré and unfashionable.
Daily Telegraph

November 2006

Hough has always been a very fine Schumann pianist, but on the evidence of this performance of the C major Fantasy, he has matured into a great one. This was as fine an account of what is arguably the greatest of all Schumann’s solo-piano works as London has heard in a very long time: meticulous in its attention to detail, with so much that is often glossed over carefully delineated, yet boldly architectural in its grasp of the large-scale structure, too. If that was piano-playing on the highest level, then the Mozart in the programme was almost as special.
The Guardian

October 2005

This International Piano Series recital was a characteristic Stephen Hough progression from the most weighty repertoire to the airiest indulgences of salon virtuosity. There was nothing indulgent about Hough himself; rather, an unshowy intentness at the keyboard and a positive disinclination to milk applause.
The Independent

October 2005

Stephen Hough, though by a distance the finest British pianist of his generation, and one of the world’s most refined keyboard artists, has almost wilfully eluded fame. He seems embarrassed that anyone would want to lionise him, as was always apparent during his packed Queen Elizabeth Hall recital…Of his 40 CDs, seven have received major awards, a sure sign that among the cognoscenti Hough is one of the outstanding musicians of our time.
The Mail on Sunday

October 2005

[In Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a theme of Paganini] ... the spirit of Paganini hovered most above a superb pianist: Stephen Hough offered all the showmanship this piece demands, but played with a fierce intelligence. Darting in and out of the lush Bamberg strings, Hough gave us all the mercurial wit to set off a really satisfying collaboration.
The Times

October 2005

They are offered as a set [Rachmaninov’s Piano Concertos] and it is as a set that they provide the greatest rewards – never indulgent but never shy of the Big Moment; magnificently played, with an attention to detail that never precludes spontaneity, and accompanied with a sympathy and imagination that lift them well above the ordinary.
The Gramophone

October 2004

The obvious yardstick is the composer’s own playing. Hough shares with Rachmaninov a precision, a rhythmic energy, a quite beautiful singing tone and – perhaps most important in these dense textures – an unerring clarity. . . . In frenzied, melodramatic, fiery or calm moment, this performance is marked by Hough’s wonderful range of colour. Always there’s a sense of clarity and cogency, but nowhere does Hough give short measure in terms of emotional involvement.”
International Record Review

September 2004

“Hough is one of the finest pianists to come to these shores in a decade (...) This was playing which mesmerised the ear with rich imaginative worlds and hitherto unknown vistas of colour.”
Sydney Morning Herald

December 2001

“In Hough’s hands this Sonata is an incredible struggle between intellectual rigour and destructively powerful emotion. And Hough expresses all this not through wildness but through playing of the purest, most controlled musicality, an approach that is in itself quintessentially Brahmsian. One could write a complete analytical essay on Hough’s breathtakingly illuminating playing of the Second Ballade, but no words could convey the beauty he brings to the Fourth. As its veiled wounded love song sinks in total resignation, one is conscious of having been face-to-face with genius.
The Pianist

November 2001

He is in short, a totally unsnobby egghead who just happens to have a luminous, envelopingly warm tone and enough technique for any two ordinary pianists.
Time Magazine

July 1999

This is, quite simply, some of the most beautiful Schubert I have heard in years, or ever.
Fanfare