A MAGNIFICENT GRIEG PIANO CONCERTO FROM SIR STEPHEN HOUGH
Sir Stephen Hough (piano), Vancouver Symphony Orchestra/ Stanislav Kochanovsky (conductor), Music of Ravel, Grieg and Rachmaninoff, Orpheum, April 13, 2025.
With nearly 400 recordings, the Grieg Piano Concerto has claims to be the most famous Piano Concerto ever written. So, can any current performer add to what we already know? Sir Stephen Hough is always up to this type of challenge, and he gave a wonderfully intense and individual performance of the concerto with the VSO, finding genuinely-new interpretative elements to amplify the work’s dramatic power and poetic fragrance. The reading came across as freshly-minted, more compulsive and virtuosic than usual – with a clear debt to Liszt – yet fully integrated in narrative line and always aware of the sensitivity of the composer’s expression. Russian conductor Stanislav Kochanovsky collaborated well, coordinating the climaxes with precision and displaying a fine ear for orchestral balance and texture. These same characteristics were noted in his Ravel Une barque sur l’ocean and Rachmaninoff’s Third Symphony, though the latter might have had more emotional ardour.
Most listeners start with the Grieg concerto when they are very young. My first experience was when I was about 4 or 5: my mother arrived with this imposing, heavy book of Columbia 78s with the concerto title enshrined on it, and gave it to me as a present. It happened to be the (now long-forgotten) 1948 performance by Oscar Levant with the New York Philharmonic, conducted by Efrem Kurtz. Levant had a certain spirit and verve that managed to persuade, and that sent me off exploring. Thanks to my father, I was soon able to hear the famous recording by Dinu Lipatti – which is in a different league and will always be special – and, later, those of Solomon and Clifford Curzon. It is Curzon’s interpretation (with Norwegian conductor Øivin Fjeldstad) which has stayed with me for all these years, notable for its wonderful clarity of articulation, enchanting poetic beauty and dramatic power. Hough is of course from a much later generation of English pianists but all are united by their outstanding tonal control and an unremitting desire for clarity of line and texture. Hough’s recording of the concerto, with Andrew Litton conducting the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, dates from 2015. Here one notes the extra significance of recording the concerto in Grieg’s birthplace, but he was not the first: Leif Ove Andsnes set down the work for EMI in the Grieghallen in 1990.
After the famous timpani roll, Hough’s opening chords could not have been cleaner or more decisive, and he started off with buoyant energy and superb concentration. His interpretative paragraphs were sufficiently long that, with subtle inflections, he could mix this energy with a sense of caprice and sparkle while also hinting at a more lyrical fabric. Everything was sharply etched, elegant, and full of life. The arrival of the famous flute subject allowed Hough to settle into the innocence and wonder in the work and his tenderness and refinement were touching. The cadenza was probably the highlight: absolutely scintillating, full of heightened dynamic contrasts, sometimes dreamy and others times propelled by wild Lisztian rhapsodic instincts.
The hushed glow at the opening of the Adagio is one of the special moments in the work, and here I thought the orchestra might have been less soft-grained and more expressive. The treatment was pretty but lacked depth. Nonetheless, Hough’s entry was beautifully poetic and suspended. As the movement proceeded, one noticed how well the pianist negotiated the ‘build and release’ quality of the lyrical line and how he was able to use his rubato to find an improvisational feeling in the quieter murmurings. I found this very imaginative.
The finale was a rollicking adventure, wonderfully flexible in mood, and very passionate too. The Norwegian trolls that originally gave inspiration to the movement would have been delighted! The ‘daemonic’ Liszt certainly made its presence felt in many entries, but then the sauntering, jazzy rhythms of Louis Gottschalk would somehow emerge alongside. Frenzy would hold hands with poetic beauty, and there were interesting dynamic gradations in between. In fact, there were just so many intriguing emotional gyrations in the movement that one could hardly wait to see what came next. And everything built so coherently: the final coda constituted a blazing resolution to it all, fully electric! This was a terrific performance, and an imaginative one too. It was certainly more uninhibited than Hough’s studio recording, fine as that is. The encore displayed the pianist’s lovely touch in Grieg’s ever-popular ‘Rustle of Spring’.
I was interested in understanding the pianist’s inspiration for this type of interpretation. As noted in my review of Hough’s very distinguished Schumann Piano Concerto a decade ago, there seems to be a desire, first, to present the most popular Romantic piano concertos without some of their traditional padding; thus, allowing greater clarity and a stronger distillation of their emotional variety and dramatic force. Second, as noted in my interview of the same period, Hough seems to be concerned with recreating the style and interpretative freedom of the pianists that played the concerto in much earlier times. (Liszt in fact approved and played the Grieg concerto only two years after it was composed in 1868.) I could see both inspirations at work in the current performance.
To begin the concert, Stanislav Kochanovsky provided an attractive reading of one of Ravel’s most Debussy-like works, Une barque sur l’ocean, controlling its dynamics well and finding the right ebb-and-flow and shimmer within. The orchestra was particularly well balanced throughout and the instrumental voicings were clean and communicative. The closing Rachmaninoff Symphony No. 3 is a more difficult work to negotiate and, while the scale of the performance and its overall integration were good, the reading emerged as rather neutral and even-tempered. I would call it a solid reading but a slightly generalized one, not completely bringing out the work’s gnawing melancholy, its attempts at modernity, or the force of the composer’s passion. It needed more dramatic shape and emphasis. The orchestra played very well, though I admit I kept thinking that the lyrical expansion of the violin line was slightly too short for this composer, and lacked sensuality.
© Geoffrey Newman 2025
Photos courtesy of Vancouver Symphony Orchestra