Stephen Hough’s Paganini Rituals
Top international pianist Stephen Hough will give his debut concert in Thailand, performing with the Bangkok Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Singaporean conductor Darrell Ang.
This is the first concert in the Great Artists Concert Series 2013 and will take place at the main hall of the Thailand Cultural Centre on June 1 at 8pm.
The evening programme will start with the short symphonic poem In The Steppes Of Central Asia by Alexander Borodin, and conclude with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s popular Scheherazade.
Hailed as “one of the very greatest pianists of our time” by France’s Le Devoir, Hough will perform two works _ Serge Rachmaninov’s much-loved Rhapsody On A Theme Of Paganini and a second work based on the same theme, Polish composer Witold Lutoslawski’s Paganini Variations.
Since winning the first prize in the 1983 Naumberg Piano Competition in New York, Hough has become one of the most distinguished and sought-after pianists of his generation.
He is widely acknowledged as the finest British pianist of today, garnering superlatives from audiences and critics alike. The Washington Post recently described him as “a virtuoso who begins where others leave off”.
He has appeared with almost all the world’s major orchestras, including the Berlin, New York and Czech philharmonics, the Philadelphia and Cleveland orchestras, the San Francisco, Boston and BBC symphonies, and the Russian National Orchestra.
The virtuoso recently performed all the Tchaikovsky concertos over four concerts with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. He is a regular guest artist at festivals at Salzburg, Edinburgh, Aldeburgh and New York’s Mostly Mozart festival. He has recorded more than 50 CDs, which have garnered four Grammy nominations, eight Gramophone Awards and two Gramophone Record of the Year Awards.
In 2011, his recording of the complete Chopin Waltzes was awarded France’s Diapason d’Or.