Music at Merton: Stephen Hough - Musicians of Distinction : The Merton Concerts
£20-£40
Sir Stephen Hough will play the second Merton College Annual Celebrity Concert. This has been made possible thanks to a generous donation from Vijay Joshi.
Programme
Cécile Chaminade: Automne, Autre Fois, Les Sylvains
Franz Liszt: Sonata in B minor
Stephen Hough: Sonatina Nostalgica
Frédéric Chopin: Sonata in B minor
About the performer
One of the most distinctive artists of his generation, Sir Stephen Hough combines a distinguished career as a pianist with those of composer and writer. Named by The Economist as one of Twenty Living Polymaths, Hough was the first classical performer to be awarded a MacArthur Fellowship (2001). He was awarded Northwestern University’s 2008 Jean Gimbel Lane Prize in Piano, won the Royal Philharmonic Society Instrumentalist Award in 2010, and in 2016 was made an Honorary Member of RPS.
Since taking first prize at the 1983 Naumburg Competition in New York, Sir Stephen has appeared with most of the major European, Asian and American orchestras and plays recitals regularly in major halls and concert series around the world from London's Royal Festival Hall to New York’s Carnegie Hall. He has been a regular guest at festivals such as Aldeburgh, Aspen, Blossom, Edinburgh, La Roque d'Anthéron, Hollywood Bowl, Mostly Mozart, Salzburg, Tanglewood, Verbier, and the BBC Proms, where he has made 29 concerto appearances, including playing all of the works of Tchaikovsky for piano and orchestra, a series he later repeated with the Chicago Symphony.
Published by Josef Weinberger, Sir Stephen has composed works for orchestra, choir, chamber ensemble, organ, harpsichord and solo piano. He has been commissioned by the Takacs Quartet, the Cliburn, CMS Lincoln Center, the Berlin Philharmonic Wind Quintet, the Gilmore Foundation, The Genesis Foundation, the Walter W. Naumburg Foundation, London’s National Gallery, Wigmore Hall, Le Musée de Louvre and Musica Viva Australia among others. Sir Stephen contributed an organ piece for the Merton Choirbook in 2014.
A noted writer, Sir Stephen has contributed articles for The New York Times, the Guardian, The Times, Gramophone and BBC Music Magazine, and he wrote a blog for The Telegraph for seven years which became one of the most popular and influential forums for cultural discussion and for which he wrote over six hundred articles. He has published four books: The Bible as Prayer (Bloomsbury and Paulist Press, 2007); a novel: The Final Retreat (Sylph Editions, 2018); a book of essays: Rough Ideas: Reflections on Music and More (Faber & Faber and Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2019); and a memoir: Enough: Scenes from Childhood (Faber & Faber, 2023).
