Stephen Hough Songs gave us love in all its thrills, messiness and pain ✒️ This concert was both dazzling and profound, examining every kind of amorous situation ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 🟠 michaelwchurch1
Michael ChurchThe newly-knighted pianist Stephen Hough has a lot on his plate, but that’s how he likes it. Last month, there was a recording by the Takács Quartet of his delicately allusive first string quartet, plus a new recording by him of music by the mystical Spanish composer Federico Mompou entitledEnough
, Hough’s startlingly candid autobiography, will be published next month. And since it flourishes the fact that he’s remained a practising Catholic while being in a permanent gay relationship, it squares an interesting moral circle. , Sir Stephen has revealed an additional facility – as a poet. This facility came into being thanks to unexpected force majeure., is a melody “about a one-night stand” whose text was to be W. H. Auden’s famous lullaby, “Lay your sleeping head, my love…” But when Hough requested permission from the Auden estate to use it, so many obstacles were raised that he gave up, and decided to write his own poem to fit his already-composed music.
This concert was both dazzling and profound. It began with settings of poems by Rilke, Oscar Wilde, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Lady Antonia Fraser, and progressed, via settings of poems by Yeats, Housman, and some of Hough’s contemporaries, to climax in the setting of a forbiddingly austere Christian liturgical text, which Hough’s music transmuted into an improbable little drama.
In these songs, every kind of amorous situation was held up to the light and examined, revealing love in all its thrills, messiness, and pain. The texts ranged from the flippantly sardonic to massive existential despair ; some conveyed intense pathos and the desperately hunted quality of a love that, in earlier times, dared not speak its name .
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