I didn't even know we were waiting for it until it arrived, but Stephen Hough has delivered the finest new piece of music for solo piano in our young century. His Sonata No.2, "notturno luminoso," is the centerpiece of the pianist's new CD, In the Night (Hyperion), a canny collection of night-themed pieces that includes works by composer-colleagues Beethoven, Chopin and Schumann. The openly �" jubilantly, really �" gay Hough's "notturno luminoso" is just what you want: a piece conceived, imagined and created on the modern piano that richly rewards multiple listenings and, best of all, makes its impact the first time out. Let the prestidigitation begin.
It flies in on the wings of Messiaen, and for the first five minutes or so you could be excused for thinking a flock of that mystic French Catholic composer's songbirds had flown the coop and landed on Hough's score paper, birds-on-a-wire-style. It's a surprise in that there's precious little Messiaen in Hough's large discography �" and not in that Hough too is a devout (if independently minded) Catholic who, like his predecessor, thinks as much with his fingertips as with his large, nimble brain.
Hough just might be the smartest pianist among us �" though the competition is really stiff there �" but he wears it lightly, as anyone who follows his blog in the London Telegraph or his Twitter feed @houghhough knows. His considerable paws notwithstanding, you would not count him among the pianist animals on the circuit, but his probing intelligence enlivens everything he does. He's an entertainer in the deepest sense of the word.
The birdsong segues into a perpetual-motion figure that becomes one of the sonata's main features and is never away from the soundscape for long. It makes a swashbuckling entrance and soon enough morphs into a more muffled, scurrying thread that periodically bursts into pairs of splashy, rising chords that, as a group, usually of five, trace a descending arc. It snags your ear on first hearing and then keeps recurring, always with further modifications yet unmistakably itself, throughout the piece. It's repetition that's learned its Bruckner, not settled for mere minimalism.
Another long, frenzied, single-note series takes to the top of the keyboard, where it slowly settles into a series of music-box tunes like the ones you find in the loftiest passages of Beethoven's sonatas. The pealing is punctuated by large, crushing forearm chords in the bass that sound anything but staged, and startle you every time.
Once the music box falls silent, those rising yet descending chords reappear in loose, sensuous, pendulous rhythms that sniff around jazz and flirt with melodies like "Around the World in 80 Days" (88 keys?) and gestures like those in Ravel's La Valse without surrendering their hard-won identity. That iridescent soundscape lingers exactly as long as you want it to, then dissolves into a lush, hushed chord in the deep bass.
That's an impressionistic, "literary" account of nearly 20 minutes of music that veils its underlying architectural grid but never sounds less than unified. It's music you can't imagine anywhere but on the piano, and it fully exploits the modern instrument's slow sound decay-rate on long-held chords played off against rapidly articulated single-note patterns that glow in the dark. This piece has studied its piano literature but has the guts to sound distinctively itself.
Hough's more analytical comments on his sonata, focusing on its A-B-A form using, respectively, all sharps, all flats, and all naturals, add another, visual as well as auditory, dimension to the work. We'll know this sonata has really made it when other, probably younger pianists �" with Hough's chops �" take it up. Igor Levit, with his lust for challenge and breadth of intellectual curiosity, comes to mind, as does Jan Lisiecki, with his giddy virtuosity and kaleidoscopic sense of color. Meanwhile we have this stunning performance by a man of Lisztian gifts.
The sonata is wrapped in repertoire Hough toured with for a year �" the reverse of the more common practice of touring a CD a musician has just recorded �" and it's all the deeper for it. Beethoven's atypical Sonata quasi una fantasia, Op. 27, No. 1 �" yes, the Moonlight �" gets a fresh, alert treatment that gives it back its invention, vitality and dignity. Resolutely unmoody if deeply felt, it's oriented toward a blistering Presto agitato finale that burns the cobwebs out of any remaining misconceptions of the piece you may have had.
No one since Miecyslaw Horszowki has played Chopin's two Opus 27 nocturnes with finer gradations of touch and feeling than Hough, and he adds to that his penetrating insights into the structural integrity of these pieces and conviction about their forward-looking harmonies. I'm not sure why Hough ends the CD with Schumann's Carnaval, other than the fact that the work's individual "events" take place at a masked ball, but his agile mind and character-breathing fingers are exactly what you want for this piece, and this could become a reference recording. (That's a good thing.)
The spooky-scary aspects of nighttime are best realized in the disc's opening work, also by Schumann, one of the "fantasy pieces" of Op. 12, "In the Night." Hough digs into the rippling phrases of the rising and falling waves, and the result is genuinely alarming, like waking from a bad dream.
Don't listen to this CD in daylight. It's only half as fun.