When the UK composer and painter Stephen Hough makes his début with the Irish Chamber Orchestra as conductor on Thursday March 26, audiences will be privileged to enjoy his sensational playing and composition.
Artistic director of the ICO Anthony Marwood will introduce him as one of the world’s greatest living pianists, a Grammy award winning artist who has made over 40 recordings.
Hough has been described as “a virtuoso who begins where others leave off”. His latest collaboration, of Brahms’s chamber music, with the Takács Quartet has won him a Grammy Award, reflecting universal praise from worldwide critics.
Last September, his recording of the Saint-Saens piano concertos was named the most popular classical CD of the last 30 years. He was the first ever classical musician to win a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant of $500,000 to support his art.
Stephen Hough has enjoyed a phenomenal career and many of his recordings have won international prizes.
Described as ‘dazzling’, ‘impeccable’, ‘Olympian’, he is an avid writer and composer producing essays on spirituality and sexuality, award-winning poetry, paintings and incendiary notions about making music. His rise to fame began in 1978 as a finalist in the BBC Young Musician of the Year Competition, winning the piano section. In 1982, he won the Terence Judd Award, followed by first prize at New York’s prestigious Naumburg International Piano Competition.
Stephen Hough has performed with the most prestigious of American and European orchestras, regularly giving recitals in celebrated halls all over the world, and is a frequent guest at many international festivals.
Enjoy the Thursday 26, 8pm concert at UCH of Mendelssohn, Mozart and a composition for cello and orchestra by this multi-faceted genius. Juliet Welchman, principal cellist with ICO, will play The Loneliest Wilderness Elegy.
