About this Artist

STEPHEN HOUGH is regarded as a renaissance man of his time. Over the course of his career he has distinguished himself as a true polymath, not only securing a reputation as a uniquely insightful concert pianist, but also as a writer and composer. Hough is commended for his mastery of the instrument along with an individual and inquisitive mind which has earned him a multitude of prestigious awards and a long-standing international following.

In 2001 Hough was the first classical performing artist to win a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. He was awarded Northwestern University’s 2008 Jean Gimbel Lane Prize in Piano, won the Royal Philharmonic Society Instrumentalist Award in 2010, and in January 2014 was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth in the New Year’s Honors List.

He has appeared with most of the major European and American orchestras and plays recitals regularly in major halls and concert series around the 

Hough’s 2015/16 season began with an extensive tour to Asia and includes return appearances with the Cleveland Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the San Francisco Symphony, among others in North America, as well as recitals at New York’s 92nd Street Y and London’s Barbican Centre, among other venues.

Many items in his catalog of over 50 albums have garnered international prizes including the Deutsche Schallplattenpreis, Diapason d’Or, Monde de la Musique, several Grammy nominations, eight Gramophone Awards, including Record of the Year in 1996 and 2003, and the Gramophone Gold Disc Award in 2008, which named his complete Saint-Saens Piano Concertos as the best recording of the past 30 years. Hough’s most recent releases, all for Hyperion, include the two Brahms Piano Concertos with the Salzburg Mozarteum Orchestra under Mark Wigglesworth; “In the Night” featuring Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, Schumann’s Carnaval, and Hough’s second piano sonata “notturno luminoso;” Scriabin, Janácˇek – Sonatas and Poems; and a recording of his mass, “Missa Mirabilis,” with the Colorado Symphony.

Stephen Hough is also the featured artist in an iPad app about the Liszt Piano Sonata, which includes a fully-filmed performance and was released by the cutting-edge, award-winning company Touch Press.

Published by Josef Weinberger, Hough has composed works for orchestra, choir, chamber ensemble, and solo piano. A noted writer, he regularly contributes articles for The Guardian, The Times, The Tablet, Gramophone, and BBC Music Magazine, and he was invited by The Telegraph in London in 2008 to start a blog that has become one of the most popular and influential forums for cultural discussion. His book, The Bible as Prayer, was published by Continuum and Paulist Press in 2007.

Stephen Hough resides in London, where he is a visiting professor at the Royal Academy of Music and holds the International Chair of Piano Studies at his alma mater, the Royal Northern College in Manchester. He is also a member of the faculty at the Juilliard School. Please visit his website, stephenhough.com, or his Facebook fan page.