Piano Concerto “The World of Yesterday”

• Hough’s Piano Concerto “The World of Yesterday” consists of three movements:
  1. Prelude – Cadenza
  2. Waltz Variations
  3. Tarantella appassionata
• Notes from the composer:

My Piano Concerto began with an email during one of the darker days of the pandemic: would I like to write a score for a movie about a concert pianist writing a piano concerto? As I looked at my blank concert diary, erased and masked, it seemed like a wonderful way to keep me busy. I’d never wanted to write a piano concerto (how to begin?) but the characters of this film gave me a handle: an ageing Austrian baroness and a young American composer in the 1930s. I wrote a waltz theme of Korngoldian decadence for the former, and took the bright white notes of interwar Americana for the other … and I started writing. The movie ended up going in a different direction but I had a thick pile of sketches on my desk, plenty of material for a concert work…

‘The world of yesterday’ … a subtitle with several meanings. It is borrowed from Stefan Zweig’s eponymous memoir with its celebration of Viennese culture before the First World War: the world as it used to be; nostalgia both literal and legendary. But this title became a tag for me writing this piece, representing the history of the piano concerto form itself and of the pianists who wrote these works. A world of yesterday indeed.¹

1. Stephen Hough, Notes in accompanying booklet, Stephen Hough: Piano Concerto, Sonatina & Partita performed by Sir Stephen Hough, Hyperion 68455, 2025, compact disc.