Hough Lurton

Stephen Hough has the ample virtuoso credentials to excel in these demanding exemplars of Romantic piano music. Only rarely do we miss the rhetorical flourishes or the big, burnished tone and philosophical depth of an Arrau, but this is a first-rate reading of wonderful piano music. Hough's performance of "Vallé d'Obermann," the longest by far of the Swiss book of the Années, is played like the large-scale tone poem it is, and he fully conveys the work's meditation on nature's mysteries. His tempo freedoms in "Au bord d'une source" help make this astounding "water music" a miracle of color and mood. Throughout, Hough's fleet fingers dazzle in the difficult passages and his tonal subtleties reflect the poetry in these nine pieces.

Elgar’s violin concerto – distinctively passionate and nostalgic – is one of the great late-Romantic concertos. “It is a huge piece,” says Renaud Capuçon “both in terms of its length and its romantic and noble nature.” This is Capuçon’s first recording with Sir Simon Rattle, here conducting the London Symphony Orchestra. When Rattle chose Elgar’s Enigma Variations for his inaugural concert as the LSO’s music director in 2017, he was celebrating the close historic links between the composer and the orchestra. Not only did the LSO accompany Fritz Kreisler in the premiere of the violin concerto in 1910, Elgar became its Principal Conductor the following year. Paired with the concerto on this album is his violin sonata, first performed in 1919. Renaud Capuçon, who calls the sonata “a work of nobility and tenderness”, is joined by one of the leading British pianists of today, Stephen Hough.

For Volume 50, a stellar cast has been assembled for a two-disc set that includes, unusually, one of the most famous concertos in the repertoire. Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No 1 has certainly achieved warhorse status—but in the expert hands of Stephen Hough it is a new creature. With the rest of this fascinating two-disc set we are in more usual RPC territory, with music which is actually not widely known. This is a complete survey of Tchaikovsky’s music for piano and orchestra and includes alternative versions of the second movement of Piano Concerto No 2 as well as some delicious extras.

With a household that pulsates to the glorious tones of the cello (Isserlis’s son is also a cellist) there’s clearly much material for this volume. The booklet notes manifest an obvious autobiographical vein – Isserlis’s predilection for Romantic Schumanesque items never far from the surface. There are some contemporary compositions, however, including attractive works by Gavin Bryars and Olli Mustonen, as well as imaginative contributions from both Hough and Isserlis. Alongside some lesser-known gems such as the poetic Lulu waltz by Sibelius, we have some well-worn chestnuts by Squire, Bridge, Carse and the fiery and bravura-styled Requiebros by Cassado.

Named by The Economist as one of Twenty Living Polymaths, Sir Stephen Hough combines a worldwide career as a pianist with those of composer and writer. "My father said that I had memorised seventy nursery rhymes by the age of two. This sounds suspiciously like parental exaggeration to me, but I do know that such singing was my first form of musical expression, especially as we had no classical music in my childhood home. Then, by the age of six, the piano took over… but song remained in the background."