Mirabilis: The Music of Stephen Hough

The piano has always been an important part of my life. At the age of 4 I began lessons with a piano teacher who lived around the corner, next door to my grandmother. At home I would sit for hours playing – never the pieces I was meant to be practising or learning – but just about anything I could get my hands on. It taught me to be a good sight-reader, even if it didn’t instil the discipline required to reach the starry heights of a successful soloist!

Like any other piano student, Stephen Hough was, to me, a hero. I devoured his prolific catalogue of recordings. From Schubert to Bowen, I savoured every note. By my teenage years, I was just about competent enough to delve into his Rodgers & Hammerstein transcriptions, which occupied many happy hours. I must confess I never quite conquered any of them, but I still return to them, even to this day.

I rarely play the piano in public now, but it is still my first true musical love and I often sit at home and play simply for pleasure and relaxation, even if it’s staggering through a Hough transcription.

This recording project was first introduced to me by my colleague and friend, Matthew Trusler, at Orchid Classics. We often bat ideas back and forth – not all of which can come to fruition – but as soon as Stephen’s name came up, I was excited and knew this was something worth pursuing. I devoured the scores and fell in love with all of them. Alas, there was too much music for one album, but a part of me wonders (and hopes) that the catalyst for Volume 2 may be somewhere in the ether.

The old adage says you should never meet your heroes. I will proudly testify that to be rubbish. Stephen was actively involved throughout the recordings and was relentlessly supportive and encouraging towards our efforts. Our performances were undoubtedly enhanced by his input, and I hope that this recording goes some way to providing an adequate realisation of these world-class compositions.

Michael Waldron

My father said that I had memorised seventy nursery rhymes by the age of two. This sounds suspiciously like parental exaggeration to me, but I do know that such singing was my first form of musical expression, especially as we had no classical music in my childhood home. Then, by the age of six, the piano took over … but song remained in the background. Hymns at primary school and church; later, choir at high school (Britten’s Missa Brevis was an eye/ear/mind-opening moment); and, even later, compulsory chorus class at Juilliard.

I wrote a Mass in my teenage years which might still be at the bottom of a drawer somewhere – I fear to disturb the dust. Indeed, my first twenty years were filled with composing. Then followed almost twenty years of blank paper, writing virtually nothing except concert transcriptions for me to use as encores. Until, in my early 40s, I returned to composition with a passion. One of the first pieces I wrote after resharpening my pencils was a setting of Rowan Williams’ Advent Calendar (2004) – now part of the cycle December which is on the present recording, comprising four a cappella settings of poems celebrating the month from Advent to the New Year. In the middle two – Hark the Herald (2007) and Silent Night (2010) – I took well-known texts of Christmas carols and composed new music for them. The final setting – The Gate of the Year (2004) – started life as a solo song for the tenor Robert White, comforting words broadcast on the radio by King George VI as the Second World War began its years of destruction.

Ding Dong Merrily on High (2017) is another familiar carol where I’ve taken the traditional words and written different music for them, this time aiming for maximum exuberance and jangle. It was a Christmas commission from the choir of the Catholic Church of the Immaculate Conception, Farm Street, London.

My Londinium Service (2007) was James O’Donnell’s idea: a setting of the Anglican Evensong canticles for sopranos and altos but with dual-language texts – a sort of inbuilt, sung yet unspoken ecumenism. ‘Londinium’ in the title is a tag referencing James’ professional home at the time, Westminster Abbey – a sanctuary across the centuries for the Roman then the English rites. And there is a broader ecumenism. One of the identical words in Latin and English which appears in the canticles is ‘Abraham’, and the brief, joyous, exuberant organ interlude before the doxology of the Magnificat (pedals thundering out the three syllables of that prophet’s name) suggests perhaps a hope for an ever-greater understanding between the three religions which claim him as their spiritual father.

Also for upper voices, the Three Marian Hymns (2004) use a kind of mantra-like repetition in my setting of these ancient prayers to the Virgin Mary – perhaps an echo of the Rosary devotion. In O soft self-wounding Pelican (2007) the original Latin of St Thomas Aquinas has been romantically rendered into Elizabethan verse by Richard Crashaw, echoed in the blush of lush musical language. Then, from such high, medieval Catholicism we move to Victorian Evangelical fervour in Charlotte Elliott’s heartfelt poem Just as I am (2014) which places the individual soul before a compassionate God. In this setting I wanted to bring out the sense of ardour which the words suggest. It was commissioned by Ardingly College’s Robert Costin who was their director of music at the time. After they sang the premiere Robert asked me to write him an organ piece, thus was conceived my …

Sonatina for Organ (2019), in two, short movements. The opening bar of the first consists of a 12-note row, then another row makes up bar two; but such serialism is merely a series of decorative stones, not the architecture of the building. In ABA form, the B section opposes pure diatonic tonality in the right hand with a pentatonic chordal mantra in the left (white versus black notes) until the return of section A which is an exact repeat of the earlier section’s pitches, but now in splashing and darting rhythms where before it had floated along calm waters. The second movement is a boisterous dance, full of exuberance and joy. Alongside the bouncing opening tune, the three musical ideas of the first movement reappear in different guises until the final, blaring coda when, over a pedal D, we hear the 12-note row of bar one of the piece, unison in both hands. After these twelve trumpet blasts the row is heard in an immediate retrograde, now harmonised in the piquant language of the main body of the second movement, before a final, radiant, pentatonic chord.

The main work in this recording is my Missa Mirablis (2007), a commission from Martin Baker for Westminster Cathedral Choir. The central idea, and the central movement, is the Credo – perhaps the most problematic text to set because of its length and the non-poetic nature of the words. But instead of setting it in a descriptive way I wanted to explore aspects of the psychology underlying the nature of belief … and doubt. I divide the lower and upper voices, as if innocence from experience, and only the former actually sing the word ‘Credo’, constantly interrupting the fast-paced mutterings of the tenors and basses. What at first is an encouragement to believe becomes a despairing cry as the pattered rote of the lower voices turns into defiant unbelief. Only baptism is declaimed with any sense of conviction – a last hope dashed as the final clauses about resurrection and eternal life fizzle out. A final ‘Credo’ is sung an octave lower by the upper voices – quietly, as if tired and shattered from their earlier, futile exertion.

Before this drama unfolds, the Kyrie movement has introduced us to a gentler, less complex world of forgiveness, where the melodic and harmonic material is sweet and consoling. The Gloria, joyful in its outer sections, is based on a rising scale and a falling zigzag motive. The Sanctus and Benedictus aim to contrast the divine and the human – the angelic ‘Holy, Holy, Holy’ is grand, vast, immense, whereas in the Benedictus God has become human and the music is deliberately and sentimentally intimate, as if two people are sharing a drink in a Parisian café, with a whiff of a 1950s pop tune coming from a neighbouring café’s jukebox.

The Agnus Dei takes the ‘Credo’ motive and develops it in plaintive, unaccompanied chords. When the ‘Lamb of God’ words appear for the third time the expected response is ‘Grant us peace’. But instead of peace the organ begins an interlude of mounting agitation and desperation based on chromatically altered fragments of the opening vocal chords. As this passage reaches its highpoint, with still no sign of ‘Dona Nobis Pacem’, the choir sing a fortissimo ‘Agnus Dei’ to the music which had accompanied the baptism clause in the Credo. Finally, as a climax to the whole work, the ‘Dona Nobis Pacem’ is sung. The spell has been broken and all gradually becomes calm. The piece ends musically as it began with the same melody of consolation as the Kyrie, as if the Lamb of God has brought the piece to peace, a full circle embracing and healing all creation.

And why ‘Mirabilis’? Purely personal. In September 2006 I gathered together a year’s-worth of sketches for this Mass and wrote three of the movements in three days. The following day I had a serious car crash, overturning on the motorway at 80 mph. I stepped out of the one, untouched door in my completely mangled car with my Mass manuscript and my body intact, then wrote part of the Agnus Dei in St. Mary’s Hospital, waiting for four hours for a brain scan. I was conscious, as I was somersaulting with screeching metallic acrobatics on the M1, of feeling regret that I would never get to hear the music on which I’d been working so intensely in the days before. Someone had other ideas.

And Danny Boy (2016) is … Danny Boy! No possibility to change this tune, or to forget it.

Stephen Hough