Stephen Hough’s new piano concerto, first performed in January by the Utah Symphony, arrived in Europe with the composer as soloist, partnered by Mark Elder and the Hallé. The concerto’s subtitle, The World of Yesterday, borrowed from the memoir of the same title by Stefan Zweig, suggests an exploration of musical nostalgia, as Hough acknowledges in his programme note; he draws a parallel with the pianist-composers of the years between the two world wars, such as Bartók, Prokofiev and Rachmaninov, for whom their own concertos became, in Hough’s words, “a visiting card on the road”.
Hough hardly needs such a visiting card, and his neatly proportioned work, in three linked movements, is much more than a vehicle for his pianism. But it does look fondly backwards, though in ways that never seem derivative. The “white-note” orchestral opening might hint at the wide open spaces of 1930s Americana, but its themes are filtered through a much more acerbic harmonic palette in the hefty solo cadenza that follows. A set of variations on one of those themes, a wistful waltz (recalling a Bill Evans number, Hough suggests), carefully blends the extrovert and the intimate and provides the concerto’s centrepiece, before Hough allows himself the luxury of some virtuoso showing-off in the final tarantella.
Elder had begun the concert with a rumbustious account of Dvořák’s Scherzo Capriccioso, negotiating a clear path through its careering changes of mood and key, the Hallé’s playing on point from the very first bar. A second half of Butterworth’s A Shropshire Lad Rhapsody, achingly nostalgic, and Elgar’s Enigma Variations, every detail vividly characterised with the woodwind outstanding, found both conductor and orchestra very much on familiar territory; in their final months together Elder and the Hallé are clearly keeping their standards as high as ever.
• Repeated on 16 and 19 May; the 16 May performance will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on 22 May.
