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Saturday 29 January 2011

Stephen Hough excels in celebration of Liszt

Pianist delights at Festival Hall in celebrations of this year’s Liszt bicentenary.

Stephen Hough is a pianist with virtuosity to spare
Stephen Hough is a pianist with virtuosity to spare Photo: PA

Celebrations of this year’s Liszt bicentenary are unlikely to get more exciting than last Sunday’s performance of the Piano Concerto No. 1 in E flat, given by the Budapest Festival Orchestra with Stephen Hough the dazzling soloist.

Their visit to the Royal Festival Hall – on which they were joined by Hungary’s president – was designed to mark the start of the Hungarian presidency of the EU, but music overshadowed everything else: this was quite the most arresting account of Liszt’s warhorse I have heard.

Hough is a pianist with virtuosity to spare, even when it comes to Liszt, and he put those spare pyrotechnics to good use here in supplying rare lightness, wit and musical depth. Under the baton of its founder, Iván Fischer, the orchestra tore into the opening with darksome blaze, drawing out all the Hungarian colours.

Few orchestras sound so involved when accompanying this concerto, and they joined Hough in highlighting Liszt’s pioneering way of welding the orchestral and pianistic sonorities together.

From Haydn’s Oxford Symphony to Beethoven’s Pastoral and on to the encores of a Brahms Hungarian Dance and Johann Strauss’s Peasants’ Polka, almost everything this outstanding Hungarian band played had bracing bite.

Fischer worked special textural wonders on the Beethoven, gathering the principal flute, oboe and clarinet around the podium and spreading the rest of the woodwinds throughout the orchestra. The onomatopoeic details were vivid. But though the centre-stage potted tree was a charmingly green touch, it was also distracting: was Fischer planning to bring on sheep as well?

Read Stephen Hough's Telegraph blogs

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