Richard Fairman
Financial Times
October 2015

How well the pairing of these two highly individual, contemporary composers comes off—the one mystical, the other rooted in nature and human feeling.

Stephen Hough frames his programme with Scriabin’s compact, but mightily difficult Fourth and Fifth Piano Sonatas, in which he is impressively lucid rather than sensuous, dazzling rather than elemental.

Janáček’s Piano Sonata 1.X.1905, From the Street is hardly less intense.

The highlight, though, is Janáček’s On an Overgrown Path book one, played with such inward feeling that one hardly dares to breathe—simple, tender, pure magic.