Stephen Hough is a travelling man, renowned as a brilliant pianist who plays 100 concerts a year throughout the world. And, in his case, travelling can be a boon, because it's while he is waiting for planes and at airport gates and encapsulated in aircraft that he finds time to pursue other things: writing novels, writing blogs for London's Telegraph newspaper, composing, or reading about other interests, such as fine tea, perfume and hats.
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"I'm just finishing a novel at the moment that I've been writing over the past year," he says.
A sneak preview? "Oh, sex and religion – those common topics that fill the news and make people kill each other," he laughs.
Hough arrives in Australia this month for a recital tour for Musica Viva that begins in Adelaide on April 14 and reaches Canberra for a concert at Llewellyn Hall on Thursday, April 28. He's a regular visitor, who holds Australian citizenship .
"I'm really excited about my trip," he says, "I can't wait to get back to Australia."
He will be playing a program that includes works by Schubert, Franck and Liszt and the Australian premiere of his own composition, Piano Sonata III (Trinitas).
"It's a commission from the Catholic magazine The Tablet," Hough says. "They're celebrating their 125th anniversary and I wanted to give the piece some sort of religious subtitle. I wanted to write a 12-note piece using the 12-note technique that Schoenberg had developed about a hundred years ago, but then I wanted to use, in a sense, the opposite way in which Schoenberg used it. He used it to dismantle tonality and I wanted to see if I could recapture tonality."
Hough goes on to explain this new work has a lot of thirds in it and is in three sections, "so all in all, all these threes came together and I thought of the Trinity and used the title Trinitas. It's not a great declaration of faith, but just an abstract idea of three as a concept. It struck me, though, that I was working with two elements – the Trinity and the 12-tone system – that are both dogmas. They can both lead to richness and fruitfulness but both can be very constricting. There are good things and bad things in both these dogmas, so I wanted to put the two ideas side by side, and all this comes out in my piece."
Hough, who converted to Catholicism at the age of 18, believes religion should be a natural part of life in a way that doesn't call too much attention to itself.
Another talent of his is painting, but he says his pictures don't have a specific religious significance.
"All things of beauty can speak to us of God and I'm very happy to listen to and be inspired by people of every religious background," he says. "Schubert, Franck and Liszt were all Roman Catholics who questioned or doubted or lived in different ways and religion was certainly part of all their lives."
The first half of Hough's program is described as a progression from darkness to light.
He explains Schubert's Piano Sonata No.14, D 784 was written soon after the composer discovered he was dying of syphilis.
"Here's a young man realising that a life he hoped would last another few decades would last only a few years," he says." I think you can hear in this piece a tremendous despair; a deep sense of sadness and darkness and indeed that's throughout the whole sonata. And there's no great solution at the end.
"And the Franck piece, Prelude, Chorale and Fugue, begins with darkness – a more universal kind of feeling, I think. While the Schubert is very personal, the Franck feels more like the sins of the world or the whole picture of human suffering, but it has a wonderful solution at the end. It bursts into sunshine and a pealing of church bells."
To end the program, there will be the stunning virtuosity of Liszt's Valses Oubliees No. 1 and 2 and selections from Transcendental Etudes.
Asked which composer from the past he would most like to have met and what they would have discussed, Hough chose Liszt.
"He would have been fascinating to talk to," Hough says. "He was at the beginning of so many of the things that control our lives. He invented the piano recital for a start, so the fact that I'm coming to Australia and playing a recital is totally due to Liszt. He invented the idea really of conducting other composers' music. Until then, people conducted their own music. He invented the masterclass and he was at the beginning of the development of piano technique. And everyone talks about what a kind, generous man he was.
"The Liszt pieces are not something flashy, like the Hungarian Rhapsodies. They're really great arias – concert arias. They remind me very much of the world of Bellini and that kind of coloratura passion that you get in an opera like Norma. High drama works."
Hough says he decided some years ago to concentrate on the things he most wanted to do: playing, composing, writing, but in a range limited by the time he had.
"So what went was chamber music and learning major contemporary works. I didn't want to look back in 10 or 20 years and say: Yes, I always wanted to write that piano sonata or that novel, but I never had time."
Yet, how amazing it is to consider just how much this man fits into every hour.
