Unsnobby at the Keys

It's been a down-and-up season for Stephen Hough. First, his high-profile appearance at Lincoln Center's Rachmaninoff Revisited festival in New York City, where he was scheduled to play the Russian composer's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, was scratched on account of Sept. 11. Just six weeks later, though, the pianist got a jaw-dropping phone call that wiped out all the disappointment and then some. He learned he had been tapped for a coveted MacArthur Fellowship, the $500,000 "genius grant" awarded for brilliance above and beyond the call of duty, a prize never before given to a classical performer. (Previous arts fellows include avant-garde jazzman Ornette Coleman, modern-dance choreographer Mark Morris, indie filmmaker John Sayles and The Lion King's Julie Taymor.) "It was a complete surprise and a total shock," he says, with happy amazement warming up his well-bred English accent.

Why Hough? Why now? The world, after all, is full of keyboard athletes, though few can match this one when it comes to the flair and sheer finger power on display in his latest album, a head-spinningly fizzy two-CD set of the ever-so-French music of Camille Saint-Saens, composer of Carnival of the Animals (Hyperion). But Stephen Hough is not your ordinary piano man. Uninterested in going the safe star-soloist route, he revels in playing the music he loves best in smaller cities and with regional orchestras. Yes, that includes Saint-Saens, Rachmaninoff and all the other romantic concerto merchants beloved of tradition-minded concertgoers. But his huge repertoire also includes an astonishing variety of other works, among them the challenging yet accessible "new tonalist" music of American composer Lowell Liebermann, the vaporously lyrical cameos of Spanish miniaturist Federico Mompou and Hough's own twinkling transcription of Rodgers and Hammerstein's My Favorite Things.

He is, in short, a totally unsnobby egghead who just happens to have a luminous, envelopingly warm tone and enough technique for any two ordinary pianists. Liebermann, whose Second Concerto he played at Carnegie Hall earlier this year, calls him "one of the greatest intellects, maybe the greatest, that I know of among performers." But Hough begs to differ, at least a little bit: "If that means I have a desire to understand music from the mind as well as from the heart, then I'm happy with the term, but I can't avoid the suspicion that many of the greatest composers might not comfortably be described as 'intellectuals.' There's always a danger that the act of analysis will tarnish the act of wonder."

A boyish-looking 39, Hough hails from Cheshire, England. He studied at New York City's Juilliard School and now splits his time between London and Manhattan. "New York is a wonderful place to live as an artist," he says wryly, "so long as one has the self-discipline to turn off the phone!"

Winning the prestigious Naumburg International Piano Competition put him on the map in 1983, and a contract with Hyperion, England's most imaginative classical label, has brought him both an intensely loyal audience of record collectors and a Grammy nomination for New York Variations, an album of modern American music that was TIME's pick for best classical CD of 1998.

Soft-spoken and modest to a fault, the pianist converted to Roman Catholicism as a teenager. "My faith affects my art because it affects my life," he explains. "Specifically, it puts things into perspective--success, failure, the opinions of others and all of the madness of life. I'm also conscious of participating in the creation of beauty when I play great music and of dealing with matters beyond the world of words."

Until now, Hough's low-key, my-way approach had largely kept him out of the limelight in the U.S.--he is much better known in his native England--but American audiences were starting to catch up with him even before the MacArthur-related publicity afterburner kicked in. His Rachmaninoff performance at Lincoln Center has been rescheduled for Jan. 8, and one of his songs (he composes too) will be premiered at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art on Saturday.

As for all that lovely money, he already has plans for the first chunk: "Pianists make a lot of noise, and one of the things this grant will make possible is for me to get a soundproof studio, so I can learn new works and improve my playing without my neighbors hearing the preparatory stages."

His neighbors! As if anyone in his right mind would not consider it a privilege to hear Stephen Hough practicing.