Masterpieces in miniature – born out of the lockdown

Stephen Hough Federico Mompou: Musica Callada Hyperion, out Friday ★★★★★

As I listened to this magnificent Mompou album, I kept wishing I was more like Stephen Hough. So much talent, but also so much focus and determination. When, three years ago, Hough’s (above) carefully planned world of international recitals collapsed due to Covid, he didn’t mope. He just sat down and learned some more music. Not just learned it, but polished it up incessantly, to the point it could all be recorded. As a result seven CDs have appeared that would never have seen the light of day but for lockdown.

This album, exquisite in every material particular, follows up one he made a quarter of a century ago. Mompou’s ‘music of evaporation’, as Hough calls it, has moved on from the first volume which was mainly stuff created in Mompou’s late 20s, to these four volumes from the 1960s, the final solo piano music he published in his lifetime. Here he seems to be creating music just for himself, not an audience.

Hough recalls the great Artur Schnabel telling us that Mozart is ‘a garden’, Schubert ‘a forest in sunlight and shadow’, and Beethoven ‘a mountain range’. On that basis, he suggests Mompou is a window box – exquisite miniatures not intended for public display. In these miniature masterpieces Mompou slips only too easily under the radar: in Hough’s words, the music evaporates.

The sleeve note writer, Philip Clark, recalls some words of another elusive and easily misunderstood composer, John Cage, who once said: ‘If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then 16. Then 32. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.’

Stephen Hough is made for this music, and the way he plays it, it’s easy to think that Mompou was writing not just for himself, but for Hough as well. He illuminates Mompou’s understated vision in a very special, indeed often totally memorable, way.