Stephen Hough: Piano man

Stephen Hough is head over heels in love with the lemon ricotta hotcakes and Mahnomin porridge at Hell's Kitchen -- which he calls the best breakfast joint in Minneapolis.

"After a visit here, with my four large mugs of black coffee, I'm truly ready for some Tchaikovsky -- the larger-than-life Concert Fantasia this week," the British pianist wrote on his blog.

You can find out a lot about Hough through the blog: He broke his glasses in Nashville and is hunting for new frames in Minneapolis; he's a longtime friend of Bob Neu, the Minnesota Orchestra general manager who was a classmate at Juilliard, and he has a few theories about why some observers believe Josef Hofmann was the greatest pianist of all time.

In between blog postings, Hough this week embarks on a live Tchaikovsky recording project with the Minnesota Orchestra. Under Osmo Vänskä's direction, Hough will play the Concert Fantasia this weekend and the Piano Concerto No. 1 next week. Hyperion will record those two pieces to complete Hough and the orchestra's four-part cycle of Tchaikovsky's piano-and-orchestra works.

Indeed, Tchaikovsky currently rivals the Hell's Kitchen hotcakes for Hough's passion. He comes to Minnesota after a much-celebrated turn at the BBC Proms in London, in which he played all four piano concertos on separate occasions.

"[Conductors] change the way I play the piece, and what I do changes the way they conduct the piece," he said of working with different orchestras. "This is why live music will never go away."

Those performances and the concerts in Minneapolis continue an investigation into Tchaikovsky that Hough embarked upon about four years ago after something clicked while he was giving a master class.

In his pursuit, Hough has become a vigorous acolyte for Tchaikovsky. He discounts the popular theory that the Russian master purposely killed himself ("no evidence and likely concocted"). His Tchaikovsky was a man of manners, politesse and self-discipline. He was complex man, but good with children, a raconteur. And above all, a lover of Mozart.

"That love of Mozart is an important part of his music," Hough argues, "not just because it's so careful about certain structural things. There's a classicism there, but more than that, a sort of purity underneath."

Making an event

With the appreciation, though, comes an understanding of what Tchaikovsky's work requires in performance. After his first rehearsal with Vänskä and the orchestra on Tuesday, Hough stepped out for a cup of coffee at a shop across Peavey Plaza.

"This is not top-ranked material," he said. "It has to be performed with total conviction and fire, otherwise it can be a little soggy. The performance must be made into an occasion, an event."

Two hours earlier, the pianist and conductor held an efficient meeting at the piano in Vänskä's studio, both scribbling notes about phrasing and tempos in the Concert Fantasia, which the Minnesota Orchestra has never performed. Vänskä briskly paged through the score, snapping his fingers in rhythm and pausing to ask Hough to play certain passages.

"Ah, that's how you want it. Yeah, that's nice," said Hough, breaking a smile on his intense visage.

"Again, I need your opinion on this phrase," Vänskä said at another point, reminding associate conductor Courtney Lewis, who was sitting in, that marking each phrase is "so very important. It's easy to get lost there."

After a quick lunch, Hough rehearsed with the full orchestra and Vänskä in the hall. The two collaborators continued their discussions -- Hough jumping up from the bench, Vänskä stepping down to the piano.

"We were looking for two things there: balancing the sound and finding the right tempos," Hough said afterward. Overall, he was pleased with the rehearsal, complimenting the orchestra for its first run at the Fantasia.

Life at the top

Hough, 47, begins his autumn in a comfortable place. The Times of London declared in a run-up article to his Proms concerts that Hough "has conquered the music world." Writer Richard Morrison noted that both Gramophone magazine and readers of the Times had declared Hough's two-CD Hyperion recording of the five Saint-Saëns piano concertos as the best classical CDs of the past 30 years.

As a composer, he has produced a mass that was sung at Westminster Cathedral. He is a prodigious writer, about music and religion primarily, in articles and books. And then there is the blog, which is featured in the UK Telegraph (and linked to at www.stephenhough.com).

"I've always written -- about music, art, things going on around the world," he said. "The danger is that it becomes too personal. I don't think people want it at that level of intimacy."

He is in constant demand, flying in this week from Nashville, where the surfeit of plaid shirts and cowboy hats amused him. He will leave Minneapolis for New Jersey. Then it's back home to London, then Dallas.

Hough quickly rebuked an interviewer's laugh at this hyperbole.

"I'm not joking!" he said. "I have had occasions if I've been very nervous, when through my mind has gone the notion that this is, you know, obviously not the profession for me.

"And this is in the middle of flurries of notes going by and that's kind of scary and you have to have self-discipline and not let your mind unravel when that happens."

Well, as your mother might have said: Get plenty of rest and eat a good breakfast -- and watch it with the coffee.