SSO and Sir Stephen Hough

Another SSO night yesterday. This time a piano concerto composed and performed by Stephen Hough and the famous organ concerto by Saint Saens, who was himself an organist. On paper should have been an enjoyable night.

Sir Stephen Hough is clearly a very accomplished pianist. He has a long list of achievements, been knighted and I read that Economist magazine had rated him as one of the 10 living polymaths.

But despite all this, I simply couldn’t appreciate his performance of his self composed piano concerto. Composed during Covid, it is a single movement piece about 20 minutes long but I found it without a clear theme or melody.

And he played his pieces on a Yamaha CFX piano. To me, it sounded very different from the usual Steinways used in concert halls. The sound was thin and lacked warmth. Another minus.

He followed this performance with 2 encores. A composition of his for the movie Mulan and his variations on a song from Mary Poppins. Both of these elicited an enthusiastic response from the audience.

I was looking forward to the post interval organ concerto but I was disappointed. The performance didn’t connect with me. Was it the way they played, the acoustics of the hall or the tempo adopted by the conductor? I felt the orchestra was not in sync and the playing disjointed.

Pity. I have always liked this piece ever since I heard the the dramatic final movement in the movie Babe. No such luck last night. The performance, and the final movement in particular, made no impression on me.

The highlight of the evening ended up being my bumping into my favorite Mexican Ambassador and his wife. It was so good seeing him and I ended up chatting with him both before and during the interval. This was the one bright spark in an otherwise ordinary evening.

For myself, I do need to start choosing what SSO performances I book tickets for carefully. Have been making a few mistakes.