Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies
After a lot of hard work, Stephen Hough has elevated French composer Saint-Saens' profile and racked up awards and CD sales in the process.
By JOHN FLEMING, Times Performing Arts Critic
© St. Petersburg Times, published February 9, 2003
Stephen Hough has the classical music world's version of a hit record, with his double CD of the complete works for piano and orchestra by Camille Saint-Saens. But don't confuse the British pianist with his pop counterparts.
"With classical records, 100 records sold is a big deal," Hough said. "It seems crazy to people in the pop business, but if a classical record sells 8,000 to 10,000 copies, a company is extremely happy."
Hough's recording of the French composer's five piano concertos and several shorter works may not rival the sales of the latest teen craze, but it has been racking up awards. Gramophone, the British classical music magazine, named it record of the year, and it has been nominated for a Grammy.
The pianist even received several French awards for his Saint-Saens. "For Frenchmen to acknowledge that an Englishman might be able to play their music . . . I was particularly thrilled by that," he said.
Hough made the recording with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Sakari Oramo conducting. Released on the Hyperion label (list price: $36.99), it will doubtless be a steady seller for decades to come, long after Nelly and Eminem have been forgotten.
"Pop music is designed, on the whole, to appeal for a three-month period and sell millions of copies and then kind of disappear, whereas the music we're talking about here runs in hundred-year cycles," Hough said.
Next weekend, he plays Saint-Saens' fourth concerto with the Florida Orchestra. Jahja Ling conducts the program, which also includes Barber's one-movement First Symphony and Dvorak's From the New World Symphony.
Before Hough's recording, the Saint-Saens concertos were not well-represented on disc. Pascal Roge's predigital cycle with conductor Charles Dutoit and various London orchestras from more than 20 years ago was the most readily available.
Nor were the concertos especially well-regarded, with one reviewer calling them "some of the greatest elevator music ever written."
Hough's task was to make the artistic case for Saint-Saens, and at first he hesitated to take on the challenge. He had played the second, fourth and fifth concertos, but he didn't know the first and third.
"I was reluctant because I knew it would be, and indeed it turned out to be, an immense amount of work," he said.
"I like to work very thoroughly on things. I can't bear learning something at the last minute and not being on top of it. I like to think about it a lot, work on it for a month, leave it for a couple of months, come back, refine things, think pianistically if I can find ways of creating different textures and sounds. This all takes time. You can't rush it. So it was a huge project to do. I suppose I ended up working 18 months on it."
Taken all together, the five concertos, plus four smaller pieces, contain a remarkable variety of piano music. The styles include the homage to Bach that opens the second concerto, the romanticism of the fourth ("the grandest, most symphonic of the five," Hough said) and some surprising ragtime rhythms ("astonishing for a piece written in 1905") in the finale of the fifth concerto.
Hough listened to historical recordings of Saint-Saens playing the piano. They convinced him that the composer's fast metronome marks were workable.
"He made a few 78 LPs, and it was kind of what I had in my ear, this fleet, graceful, very forward-moving kind of playing. The recordings are scratchy three-minute sides from 1904, but you do get a good idea of the style of his playing, of how he approached the keyboard. That was quite an important influence on how I thought about the works," Hough said.
It's common for critics and musicians to fault Saint-Saens for a supposed lack of depth. Pianist Philippe Entremont, for example, once said that the Frenchman's concertos didn't have the emotional impact of the concertos of German romantics such as Beethoven, Schumann and Brahms.
Hough is quick to defend Saint-Saens.
"It depends on what you mean by emotion," he said. "You could say the same about Ravel or Debussy. They did not emphasize emotion in a very direct way. The whole French way is oblique; it's to say things and mean other things, to have things hinted at, and I think you get this in Saint-Saens. No, you're not going to get a burst of the Brahms D-minor concerto. But the concertos are certainly not cold; they have emotion.
"Saint-Saens was very conscious of form, of the beauty in good taste and a certain sort of refinement. It all has to do with not coming to this music and being brazen and coarse with it. It's music of great subtlety in sound and structure, and I think it's important to bear this in mind when you're playing it."
In some ways, Hough is unusually well-positioned to give attention to a big, somewhat arcane project such as the Saint-Saens set. In 2001, he was a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant," which gave him $500,000, no strings attached.
The pianist used the money to build himself a studio not far from where he lives in London (he also has an apartment in New York). He's looking forward to the studio's construction, complete with 10-inch-thick insulation for soundproofing, being finished in March.
"It's where I can go and work uninterruptedly without any neighbor problems," he said. "I'm just going to have pianos; no phone, no e-mail, nothing like that. When you're working at home, the phone is always ringing, there's always a temptation to make another cup of coffee. When I have a space where I just close the door and there are nothing but pianos there, I'll be able to get much better and more concentrated work done."
PREVIEW: Stephen Hough is the soloist in the Saint-Saens Piano Concerto No. 4 with the Florida Orchestra at 8 p.m. Friday at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center, Tampa; 8 p.m. Saturday at the Mahaffey Theater at Bayfront Center, St. Petersburg, and 7:30 p.m. Feb. 16 at Ruth Eckerd Hall, Clearwater. Tickets: $20-$42. (813) 286-2403 or toll-free 1-800-662-7286.