Stephen Hough's String Quartet No. 1 To Premiere At 92NY This March

Pianist, composer, and author Sir Stephen Hough joins the Castalian Quartet on a U.S. tour this spring that includes the New York Premiere of his String Quartet No. 1, “Les Six Rencontres,” on Friday, March 8 at 7:30 p.m. at the 92nd Street Y, New York.

The tour program also includes Haydn's String Quartet in A major, “Sun,” and Brahms's Piano Quintet in F minor, for which Sir Stephen joins the Castalians. This marks the second tour of “Les Six Rencontres”; the work was also recorded by the Grammy–winning Takács Quartet alongside quartets by Ravel and Dutilleux, released on Hyperion Records in January 2023. In a review of the recording, The Times described “Les Six Rencontres” as “an immediate winner,” while BBC Music Magazine wrote, “Above all, Hough's is an unmistakably individual and convincing voice.”

Other stops on the tour include the Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa California (which presented the string quartet's World Premiere in 2021) on Saturday, March 2 at 7:30 p.m.; the Sunset Center for the Arts, presented by Carmel Music Society, on Sunday, March 3 at 3:00 p.m.; First United Methodist Church, presented by Chamber Music in Napa Valley, on Monday, March 4 at 7:30 p.m.; the Shalin Liu Performance Center, presented by Rockport Music, on Saturday, March 9 at 7:30 p.m.; and The Phillips Collection on Sunday, March 10 at 4:00 p.m.

Sir Stephen composed “Les Six Rencontres” at the invitation of the Takács Quartet, who were seeking a companion piece for the Ravel and Dutilleux quartets on the aforementioned Hyperion release. In his note on the piece, Sir Stephen says:

“It was a thrilling if daunting challenge, and it gave me an immediate idea as I considered these two colossi who strode across the length of the 20th century—not so much what united their musical languages, but what was absent from them, not to mention the missing decades between the Ravel Quartet of 1903 and Dutilleux's Ainsi la nuit from the mid-1970s.”

He goes on to explain that, for his first string quartet, he was drawn to the music and aesthetic of Les Six—the famous group of six French composers most active and associated with the interwar period—as a ‘missing link' of sorts between Ravel and Dutilleux. Regarding the flavor of Les Six' music, Mr. Hough says:

“It's not so much a lack of seriousness, although seeing life through a burlesque lens is one recurring ingredient; rather it's an aesthetic re-view of the world after the catastrophe of the Great War. Composers like Poulenc and Milhaud were able to discover poignance in the rough and tumble of daily human life in a way which escaped the fastidiousness of those other two composers.”

The work's subtitle, “Les Six Rencontres,” is both a reference to Les Six and to the work's six movements, each of which is conceived as a unique, imaged ‘encounter' (rencontre) within the cultural zeitgeist represented by Les Six, though without any direct quotation or overt musical allusion. The title of each movement reflects a different location (“Au boulevard,” “Au parc,” “A l'hôtel,” for example) where these hypothetical encounters could have taken place.

Recently, Sir Stephen's compositions have been spotlighted through the September 2023 release of Mirabilis, an Orchid Classics album of his choral works, and through the World Premiere of his Piano Concerto No. 1, “The World of Yesterday,” with the Utah Symphony under Sir Donald Runnicles in January 2024; the Piano Concerto also receives performances by the Calgary Symphony in March 2024 and its European Premiere in Manchester with the Hallé Orchestra in May 2024. Later in the fall, Sir Stephen joins the Viano Quartet for the world premiere of his Piano Quintet (Les Noces Rouges), presented by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.

SIR STEPHEN HOUGH

Named by The Economist as one of Twenty Living Polymaths, Sir Stephen Hough combines a distinguished career as a pianist with those of composer and writer. He was the first classical performer to be awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the New Year Honors 2014, and was awarded a Knighthood for Services to Music in the Queen's Birthday Honors 2022.

He has performed extensively in recital and with most of the world's major orchestras, and his catalog of around 70 albums has garnered four Grammy nominations, eight Gramophone Awards and France's Diapason d'Or de l'Année. As a composer he has been commissioned by Westminster Abbey, Westminster Cathedral, Wigmore Hall, the Gilmore Foundation, the Genesis Foundation, members of the Berlin Philharmonic amongst others. He wrote the commissioned work for the 2022 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, performed by all 30 competitors, and his String Quartet No.1 Les Six Rencontres, commissioned for the Takács Quartet, was recorded for Hyperion Records. His music is published by Josef Weinberger Ltd.

As an author, Hough's memoir Enough: Scenes from Childhood was published by Faber & Faber in Spring 2023. It follows his 2019 collection of essays for Faber, Rough Ideas: Reflections on Music and More – a 2020 Royal Philharmonic Society Award winner and one of Financial Times' Book of the Year 2019 – as well as his first novel, The Final Retreat (Sylph Editions, 2018). He has also been published by The New York Times, The Telegraph, The Times, and The Guardian. Hough is an Honorary Bencher of the Middle Temple, an Honorary Member of the Royal Philharmonic Society, and was a Visiting Fellow at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford University from 2019 to 2022.