Rachmaninov’s hairy chest, and other entertainments

Friday, 13 May 2016, 12:18 pm
Article: Max Rashbrooke

Stephen Hough has just finished a novel. Which would be unremarkable, were he a novelist, but he’s not: he’s a concert pianist. Or rather, he’s a concert pianist, composer, columnist, and painter. (And novelist.) He’s one of that rare breed, the modern polymath, which is a wonderful thing, although I feel slightly tired just thinking about all those different activities.

One of the things he sometimes does is write about men’s fashion. In previous interviews he’s admitted to a penchant for hats; he’s not wearing one for our interview, which takes place in the lobby of the Intercontinental Hotel, though apparently he was sporting a flat cap for breakfast.

“I’ve got quite a collection of hats,” he says, in his calm, warm, British accent, “but they’re not very good for travelling with because they get squashed.” Also, he has very tidy but slightly thin hair, and the hat hair effect is “so horrible”. Still, he has on a rather nice blue suit with a discreet check.

Hough is a dream to interview – thoughtful, endlessly articulate, alternately serious and impish – and in the blink of an eye he’s off on a social history of hat-wearing. He was fascinated, he says, to read recently that, in the 1920s, wearing an incorrect hat could lead to violence: sporting a straw hat on the wrong day, for instance could cause “such an outrage that they would actually knock the hat off and trample on it. … We’re talking about real violence!”

Not that he’d want to live in that era, despite its enthusiasm for hats. Quite apart from being gay, he’s a non-conformist, and, by his own admission, slightly bossy. So no strict rules on dressing up for him. “No, because I like to do that by my own choice. If everyone wore hats I’d be the one not wearing one!” Besides, he adds, the 1920s was “a miserable time to be poor. I would probably have been a servant in someone’s house. Even if I played the piano I would have been playing for entertainment. If you didn’t go to certain schools and certain universities, there was no hope for you.”

Hough’s own background, as one gathers from that remark, was nothing out of the ordinary, and – perhaps surprisingly – there was no classical music in the house when he was growing up. But he did have an aunt who had a piano, and from an early age he was always on it, trying to play the nursery rhymes he had learnt at school.

He enjoyed it so much that he nagged his parents to buy him a piano – “I was, and am, persistent” – until eventually they got him a secondhand number for five pounds. His mother then looked up a piano teacher in the phone book, “like you would look for a cleaner, or someone to do the drains,” though fortunately he was later heard playing in a piano shop and taken under the wing of some more talented teachers.

His big break came in 1983, when he was studying at the Juilliard music school in New York, and entered the Naumburg piano competition “just for a lark” and with an audition tape so bad – you could hear his friends chatting in the background – that he was nearly turned away at the outset. Much to his surprise, he won, and he’s been a concert pianist ever since – one, moreover, in ever greater demand.

Hough is commonly regarded as one of the best living pianists (and indeed of all time), recognised for the sensitivity of his playing, his mastery of structure and his extraordinary attention to what classical musicians call texture – the shifts and changes in colour, style, dynamics and phrasing that are at the heart of all great music. The Guardian once described his performances as “the most perfect piano playing conceivable”.

These formidable talents are, in this current New Zealand tour with the NZSO, being trained on Brahms’s second piano concerto. Brahms’s first, written when he was 25, is a massive, if occasionally flawed, display of emotion. The second, Hough says, “is like a great big piece of chamber music. It’s all about collaboration, a conversation which is give and take”. Unusually, its climax comes in the middle, as the passion is “ratcheted up” for the second movement. “Where do you go from there? You go to a song … then you go into something that’s actually graceful.”

Getting that right – and making the end sound like a natural counterpoint to what’s gone before, rather than an anti-climax – takes all Hough’s considerable skill in seeing the big picture, playing every note with a view to how it fits into the whole 50-minute work. It’s a labour of love and style, not sweat and storm – and he applies that approach even in the repertoire that is often played extravagantly, like Rachmaninov, which I once heard him perform in London.

“Rachmaninov’s own [piano] playing has tremendous aristocratic poise,” Hough says. And while the music itself is “intensely emotional”, it’s “more powerful if you’re not sweating over it. I’ve described it in the past as a racehorse, not a warhorse. Because that was not his style. He didn’t sort of emote in a physical way.” There was always, he says, “an element of control” about Rachmaninov’s own playing. “And you want to feel you’re on top of this piece, not underneath it. A rather unfortunate analogy could be continued from that – but we won’t follow it, not even for Scoop!”

That’s Hough’s charm – the ability to go from utterly serious to mildly saucy, without missing a beat. I remind him of the fact that he once said he didn’t like the “hairy-chested” style of piano playing, and he laughs. “Did Rachmaninov have a hairy chest? There’s the question! Mind you,” he adds, “there’s nothing wrong with hairy chests.”

From this, we somehow get onto Rachmaninov’s home movies, which have ended up on YouTube, as everything does, and which show the supposedly gloomy composer – he was known as “six foot of scowl” in the classical world – “smiling, falling over on the floor with his kids, his grandkids, it really is one of those touching things … you get an insight into the warmth of this man.”

After Rachmaninov, we’re back onto Hough’s other interests, including his painting – a kind of colour-heavy abstract expressionism, which he says comes “the same place in the heart” as his piano playing, but is often a release valve after hours spent trying to get the pedalling right in a particular passage. “It’s part of an artistic expression that has different spouts but comes from the same brook, or source.”

Writing is also “absolutely central to who I am ... as important to me as playing the piano”. Hence the novel, which he finished around a month ago. So what’s it about, then? “Sex and religion!” In style, he says, “it’s quite modernist. It’s the form of a diary of a priest who’s lost his faith and his morals and is in a state of real personal torment. It’s really a prose poem.” It contains, among other thing, “vignettes with various prostitutes”. Some of these vignettes are positive; with others, Hough says, “I’m hoping that you feel quite sick reading them because that’s what I want you to feel – they’re rather seedy!”

Even though Hough himself is Catholic, and once thought of becoming a priest (partly to forestall questions about why he didn’t have a girlfriend), the novel is “not a portrait of me”, albeit some of the religious material comes out of his own thoughts and doubts. But he denies having experienced major emotional trauma trying to reconcile his faith with his sexuality.

“I didn’t grow up with Catholicism, I converted, so I can’t say that I did [experience that trauma]. But I certainly know how it feels to hide things away.” For him, the beauty of religion is that it makes everything sacred, especially the material world, even in its more troubling aspects. “Suffering and pain is precisely where God meets us – the sense that you meet God washing the dishes, having a meal with friends, in music.”

Details of Stephen Hough’s concerts with the NZSO can be found here

© Scoop Media

Max Rashbrooke

Journalist

Max Rashbrooke is a journalist and author working in Wellington, New Zealand, where he writes about politics, finance and social issues.

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