When pianist Stephen Hough joins the Dallas Morse Coors Concert Series at Cornell University, audiences can expect not only a wide-ranging program, but also a healthy dose of British humor.
“Stephen works just fine,” he laughs, when asked how to address him. Knighted in 2022, he notes that while one technically “loses ‘Mr. Hough,’” the title is “just a bit of fun, and I certainly don’t take it very seriously.”
The program he brings to Bailey Hall on Friday, March 20, is built around short piano works — Klavierstücke — a genre that flourished as the piano became the centerpiece of 19th-century domestic music-making. “As the piano developed, there was a huge market for these small pieces to be played at home,” Hough explains. With Schubert and Brahms, he says, “you have both composers at the top of their form — mini-masterpieces.”
The evening also includes Schumann’s Carnaval, “a string of pearls” in which “none of them could be played by themselves,” he says of the interconnected miniatures. There’s a fleeting, “crazy” 15-second work by Stockhausen, an even shorter late Beethoven Bagatelle, and — anchoring the program — Beethoven’s monumental “Waldstein” Sonata.
“Every bar he wrote has this kind of energy,” Hough says of Beethoven. “And I don’t mean energy just in terms of speed, but creativity. There’s something in him which is like a fire.” He speaks with palpable excitement about the sonata’s shimmering pedal effects: “Everything is in a sort of haze until the sun comes out. It’s so tightly constructed, so brilliant. It’s a joy for me to play. I get very excited even talking about it — never mind playing it.”
Switching styles so rapidly might seem daunting, but Hough says the composers themselves do the work. “It just takes two notes for me to be in the mood of that Brahms,” he says. Even Schoenberg’s six tiny piano pieces — “marvelous little vignettes” inspired by early 20th-century Expressionist art — immediately conjure their distinct world.
The concert concludes with three encores: Hough’s own transcriptions from Mary Poppins. “What remains of short piano pieces, usually, is encores,” he jokes.
That creativity extends far beyond the keyboard. Hough composes extensively — his most recent recording features his own piano concerto — and he’s currently at work on a large Requiem. “Composing is becoming, I would say, half of my creative life,” he says. “It feels like a very important part of who I am.” He has also published three books in the past decade.
In fact, he believes pianists should compose more often, as they once routinely did. “If you can read a book, you can write a book,” he says. “It may not be a very good book, but you can. Reading and writing music — it’s exactly the same.” He encourages young musicians to try their hand at composition, pushing back against the mid-20th-century notion that one shouldn’t compose “unless they could write a masterpiece.”
As for teaching? “I have half a student at Juilliard,” he quips, sharing the pupil with a colleague. “That’s all I do.”
The Dallas Morse Coors Concert Series at Cornell University presents Stephen Hough in concert Friday, March 20, at 7:30 p.m. in Bailey Hall on the Cornell campus. For more information, visit cornellconcertseries.com.