Postcards – Stephen Hough, piano (Hyperion)

Sir Stephen Hough takes us on a world tour with his new album Postcards, a charming collection of piano miniatures, souvenirs, if you will, collected over his many years of touring and performing around the globe. These pieces form a homage to the places he has come to love, musical postcards sent home from four continents to delight the ears. This is also a deeply personal and nostalgic album: as Hough says, “these are some of the first classical pieces I heard as a boy”. 

Hough says of the album, “‘Postcards’ suggest many things for me: travel, of course, greetings sent across the seas, ‘wish you were here’; but also writing to someone from home, a few words often meaning more than they say.”

In addition to familiar encore pieces such by Schumann, Rachmaninov, Sibelius, Sinding, Granados, Edward MacDowell, Abram Chasins, Malcolm Williamson – many of which Sir Stephen has performed on concert stages around the world – there are his own witty and delightful reimaginings of popular songs from film scores, some of which were created for and included in Lang Lang’s Disney Book album.

Hough’s transcriptions of songs from the film ‘Mary Poppins’, for example, pay a warm tribute to the originals and remind us of what great songs they were – melodic and memorable. And there’s something almost Lisztian about these transcriptions – they are redolent of Liszt’s Schubert song transcriptions in their fidelity to the original while highlighting all the original imagination and loveliness of these well-known melodies.  

In Supercalifragilistic, there’s a nod to another well-known encore piece, if you can spot it… (we hear it a few tracks later), and the entire piece is given an exhilarating virtuosic brilliance, replete with Hough’s particular luminous, transparent tone and sparkling range of colours. 

The variety in mood, pace, texture and melodies of the pieces on this recording ensures the album never falters, and the listener is treated to a pleasing ebb and flow of energy and repose. Far from a collection of musical amuse-bouches, Hough treats each piece with his characteristic care and attention; thus, each is a gem, sensitively shaped and exquisitely executed. 

Hough’s own arrangements are perhaps the album’s greatest delight, though everything here is wonderful. The Japanese song Aka tombo is transformed into a work of radiant simplicity, while the Taiwanese Spring Breeze Prelude unfolds with effortless grace. Perhaps most surprising are the Disney selections – Do You Want to Build a Snowman?, Reflection, and Remember Me. In other hands, they might seem gimmicky, but Hough reveals their harmonic sophistication – inner melodies, motifs from the chorus – and they become not nostalgic curiosities or clever reinventions but genuine salon pieces. 

The slower, more reflective pieces are equally rewarding: Wilhelm Kempff’s arrangement of Handel’s G minor Minuet provides a particularly beautiful moment of restrained elegance between the more colourful and energetic excursions. 

In an era when recital programming often strives for conceptual seriousness, Stephen Hough’s Piano Postcards reminds us that delight can be a virtue in itself. This album wears its detailed scholarship and musical ingenuity lightly. It is sophisticated, virtuosic, and deeply personal without ever becoming self-indulgent. It is also proof, should it be needed, that good music can be found everywhere, not just in the repertoire of so-called “art music” or “serious classical music”. This is an album for all who simply love music without prejudice or preconceptions.

“I think all good music is equally worthy…” Sir Stephen Hough

Postcards is available now on the Hyperion label. 

Highly recommended

FW