Stephen Hough's Spanish Album

Stephen Hough’s latest solo album takes us on a colourful tour of Spain and all things Spanish: a kaleidoscope of slants and angles on the soul and character of a once exotic and remote country.

Antonio Soler (whose innumerable sonatas were considered sufficiently outlandish to earn him the sobriquet ‘the devil dressed as a monk’) sets the scene for a sequence of impressionist wonders by Granados, Albéniz and Mompou (a disc of whose pianistic micro-masterpieces—CDA66963—won for Stephen Hough the 1998 Gramophone Instrumental Award), and Federico Longas’s insinuatingly virtuosic charmer Aragón.

Hough then allows outsiders a view into the magical kingdom. Debussy and Ravel peer longingly over the Pyrenees, while Godowsky, Scharwenka, Niemann and finally Hough himself are all in turn unable to resist this richest of cultural experiences.

Stephen Hough’s esoteric recital CDs rapidly acquire something of a cult status. Classic CD wrote of Stephen Hough’s New Piano Album CDA67043: ‘This is a terrific disc. A master pianist reminds us that the piano can delight, surprise and enchant’; while Classic FM Magazine welcomed Stephen Hough’s English Album CDA67267 saying: ‘Hough’s pianism is a constant source of wonder—every chord and phrase perfectly judged’.

CDA67565  70 minutes 59 seconds
BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE DISC OF THE MONTH
CLASSIC FM BEST INSTRUMENTAL CD OF 2006
MAIL ON SUNDAY BEST INSTRUMENTAL CD OF 2006
‘Hough is one of Britian's best-kept cultural secrets; a pianist of such sophistication he will, I suspect, by the end of his career be able to be mentioned in the same breath as the few great British ...
‘I cannot imagine many piano lovers failing to fall for this delectable and all-too-brief collection of impressions, portraits and postcards. If you are not drawn to the imaginative programme of the f ...
‘Hough again has a more intimate stance than many pianists, quietly brilliant in the cross-cutting between musical ideas. Everything is wonderfully fresh and nothing is laboured—it's a superb and surp ...