Word: hough
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...been a down-and-up season for Stephen Hough. First, his high-profile appearance at Lincoln Center's Rachmaninoff Revisited festival in New York City, where he was scheduled to play the Russian composer's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, was scratched on account of Sept. 11. Just six weeks later, though, the pianist got a jaw-dropping phone call that wiped out all the disappointment and then some. He learned he had been tapped for a coveted MacArthur Fellowship, the $500,000 "genius grant" awarded for brilliance above and beyond the call of duty, a prize never before...
...Hough? Why now? The world, after all, is full of keyboard athletes, though few can match this one when it comes to the flair and sheer finger power on display in his latest album, a head-spinningly fizzy two-CD set of the ever-so-French music of Camille Saint-Saens, composer of Carnival of the Animals (Hyperion). But Stephen Hough is not your ordinary piano man. Uninterested in going the safe star-soloist route, he revels in playing the music he loves best in smaller cities and with regional orchestras. Yes, that includes Saint-Saens, Rachmaninoff...
...unsnobby egghead who just happens to have a luminous, envelopingly warm tone and enough technique for any two ordinary pianists. Liebermann, whose Second Concerto he played at Carnegie Hall earlier this year, calls him "one of the greatest intellects, maybe the greatest, that I know of among performers." But Hough begs to differ, at least a little bit: "If that means I have a desire to understand music from the mind as well as from the heart, then I'm happy with the term, but I can't avoid the suspicion that many of the greatest composers might not comfortably...
Lauren E. Hough...
...year by Milwaukee's Florentine Opera. Liebermann is also a master of the fine art of writing knockout showpieces for world-class soloists. He takes the baton on two CDs devoted to his concertos, the first featuring superstar flutist James Galway (RCA), the second with English piano virtuoso Stephen Hough (Hyperion). Liebermann's Second Piano Concerto, raves Hough, is a "combination of brain and heart...