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.
