Sir Stephen Hough: 'Radio 3 remains an incredibly important platform for music'
The pianist has created a new piece of music.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.
New York will always be a special place for piano virtuoso and composer Sir Stephen Hough. The 63-year-old moved there when he was 19 to study at the world- famous Juilliard School. He had grown up in Warrington and attended the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, “so moving to New York was my awakening. I fell in love with it,” he says. He stayed, bought an apartment and made the city his base for years until Covid hit and he moved back to London.
So, when the BBC asked him to be part of Radio 3’s new landmark series, he knew immediately what his theme would be: 9/11, the moment New York, and indeed the world, changed.
25 for 25: Sounds of the Century features 24 composers alongside Hough, all commissioned to create music to evoke moments of history, or people, or innovations that have shaped the first quarter of the 21st century.
But Hough has created a piece with a twist: a nocturne called September 10th 2001, set the night before the attack on the World Trade Center that left nearly 3,000 people dead. While a nocturne often hints at tranquillity, his suggests something more than that. “What I wanted to capture was a time of innocence, but there is an undertow, a little bit of premonition.”
He explains that the five-minute piece finishes with the pianist’s two hands playing in two different keys, which “evokes the beginning, yet something has changed”.
He spent the evening of 10 September with his friends, the composers John Corigliano and Mark Adamo, watching a video of Adamo’s opera of Louisa M Alcott’s Little Women, another instance of innocence with an undertow – in its case the American Civil War.
After that late night in Manhattan, he was woken the next morning by a friend’s phone call, telling him what had happened. He has never watched footage of the Twin Towers falling but his memory of that day is vivid.
He recalls listening to radio updates, phoning his mother to say he was safe, rushing out to a supermarket where the food shelves were already emptying, the smell of burning wafting north from the towers towards his apartment on 100th Street, and going to Mass at his nearby Franciscan church.
His faith – he is a Roman Catholic convert – also meant he had a personal connection with the attack. Among those who died was Father Mychal Judge, a Franciscan friar who was chaplain to the New York City Fire Department and died in the North Tower while tending to the dying. Hough had attended the church where Father Mychal had heard his confession and remembers his words: “He told me we must realise God is merciful in all our weaknesses and to trust Him.”
Hough is currently back in the US for a tour, playing several of his compositions, while his nocturne will be performed on Radio 3 by former New Generation Artist Elisabeth Brauss. Knighted in 2022, he is part of the classical music establishment but is excited to see talented new performers like Brauss emerge.
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What also delights him is the change that has come about in contemporary classical music. “There’s so much freedom. In the 1950s, '60s, '70s, people knew a contemporary piece would be extremely ugly, loud and they weren’t going to like it. In the late '70s you couldn’t get into music college or get recorded or a BBC commission if you didn’t write atonal music. My nocturne would’ve been thrown out of the window.
“Now we have a far more diverse world. You don’t have to be serious all the time,” says the man who delighted 2024’s Last Night of the Proms audience with his playful fantasia on Mary Poppins’s Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. “Music is eclectic and Radio 3 is part of that. It remains an incredibly important platform for music.”
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