The
63-year-old British pianist Stephen Hough brought his formidable Liszt/Chopin sonata recital program to the Herbst Theater on Tuesday evening, sponsored by the invaluable
San Francisco Performances. Hough is an official MacArthur Fellowship genius, a brilliant writer, a musical composer/arranger, a colorful painter, and above all a frighteningly accomplished pianist. He's also gay, a Catholic convert, and has often longed to be a priest or a Franciscan monk.
Hough sometimes champions overlooked 19th century composers, usually French, and this concert started with three piano pieces by Cécile Chaminade (1857-1944):
Automne, Autre fois, and
Les sylvains. Chaminade's style is reminiscent of Camille Saint-Saëns, and she was a prolific, accomplished composer whose music was demeaned both because of her gender and because her style went out of fashion once the 20th century arrived. The trio of works were all interesting and it would be great to hear more of her work.
This was followed by Franz Liszt's strange, craggy, monumental
Piano Sonata in B Minor (1853), 30 minutes of uninterrupted piano drama that I had somehow never heard before. Hough's performance was loud and dramatic, which suited the music, and by the end of the performance a friend said, "My fingers started hurting just watching that."
I could have happily gone home fulfilled after the first half, but there was more after an intermission. Hough wrote a short, three-movement piece called
Sonatina Nostalgica for an old friend's 70th birthday, evoking their shared childhood village of Lymm in Northwest England. This was the first time he spoke to the audience, describing the place and the piece, and it was also the only time he used a (digital) score while playing. Everything else on the program he had somehow memorized.
Bookending the Liszt, he finished with Chopin's final major work, the 1844
Piano Sonata No. 3 in B Minor. I still had the Liszt performance jangling in my brain so it was hard to concentrate on the Chopin. It started feeling like "too many notes," like the apocryphal story about Emperor Joseph II and Mozart.
There were two encores, the
Warum movement from Schumann's
Fantasiestücke and Hough's own insanely virtuosic fantasia on the
Mary Poppins song
Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.
1 comment:
There are some composers whose music I didn't discover until I was in college or later and have loved ever since, like Howells and Machaut. There are other composers that I used to like, whose music my now-ancient ears no longer enjoy. Liszt is in the latter camp. The B Minor Sonata, a competition staple, now seems excessive in every regard. The ending is like Lucy and the football: just when you think it has finally arrived, it is snatched away, delayed by a fugue or another coda. The problems with Titans is that everyone wants them to play Titanic music all the time. The other Titanic B Minor Sonata on the program, Chopin's, would have been enough for me.
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