It’s hard to write about the pianist Stephen Hough, now elevated to the status of Sir Stephen, without listing his extensive claims to fame beyond the world of music – as an essayist and blogger, painter, poet, novelist and (not least) one of Britain’s best-known Catholics in the performing arts. Blessed with undoubted genius, he’s the kind of hyperactive polymath who makes the rest of us feel underachieving. If you want chapter and verse, read his new autobiographical memoir Enough, published this month by Faber.
A few weeks ago at Wigmore Hall the focus was on Hough the composer, with an entire concert given over to his song-settings, of which there are a good number. I should say upfront that this was a risky venture, because it’s never easy for the voice of a single composer to sustain interest and engagement across a whole evening: the human ear needs difference.
One of Hough’s virtues as a composer, however, is that he doesn’t have a single voice: he has a portfolio. And as his interests range far and wide, so does his music – which can be playfully, exotically, sometimes outrageously parodistic, sampling styles and soundworlds with the delight of a child in a sweet shop.
Picking up the references in this Wigmore programme, you’d have noticed everything from Messiaen to Noël Coward, piled in with relentless brilliance that could sometimes feel too much, too erudite, too overworked. Brilliant it unquestionably was, and not just on the surface. It ran deep, illuminating texts that Hough had chosen to signal things that matter to him deeply.
The preoccupying themes were spiritual and sexual: two aspects of human experience that don’t always sit comfortably together, although in Hough’s case, as someone famously Catholic and famously gay, they have to – and they do. There were settings of poems by Rilke that depicted life as a process of falling, like autumn leaves, before being gently caught in the hands of God.
There was a setting of Julian of Norwich’s famous vision of the nutshell with her timeless words, “All shall be well.” But there was also a song cycle that paired verse by Gerard Manley Hopkins with that of Oscar Wilde: two figures who, as Hough says, have more in common than either might have been prepared to admit as they struggled with their respective demons against a background of faith. Something that took Wilde rather longer to find, though he got there in the end.
Tellingly, Hough called this cycle “Dappled Things”, after Hopkins’s poem “Pied Beauty” which celebrates the variety (or as the 21st century might put it, diversity) of creation. And just as telling was the nomenclature of another cycle that Hough modelled on the Liebeslieder waltzes devised by Brahms as collections of songs for a group of voices to sing like an informal concert-party. In Brahms’ case, the collections were given over to love songs of an inevitably heterosexual nature. But Hough’s choices cast the net wider, to include songs of filial love, gay love, the love of God…
He accordingly calls the cycle “Other Love Songs” – making it a sort of outsider statement, with texts by poets from the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and a couple of the more distinctly confessional ones in which AE Housman abandons the camouflage of his Shropshire Lad verse and comes more or less clean about the torture of the love that dared not speak its name. As Hough presents all this, his “Other Love Songs” build into an utterly unique experience – and no less so for the fact that they end with the words of the Biblical Jesus, where he repeatedly asks Simon Peter “Do you love me?”
It’s text you don’t expect to find in a song recital, but Hough sets it devoutly, powerfully, with the same unflinching candour that he brought to everything we heard at the Wigmore. And it was delivered on comparable terms by the singers brought together for the event: a magnificent cohort of soprano Ailish Tynan, contralto Jess Dandy, tenor Nicky Spence and baritone James Newby – with Hough himself at the piano.
Lest you think this was a heavy-going night, I should add that it included wistful and at one point riotously funny settings of recent verse by Lady Antonia Fraser that presented like a delicate sorbet slipped into the feast.
Poignant reflections on the isolation of lockdown, on life with her late husband Harold Pinter, and the craziness of book tours in America were handled musically with an exquisite deftness. And as sung by Ailish Tynan – with impressive mastery of transatlantic accents – it was jewel-like, perfect, and a joy.
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