Stephen Hough is a British-Australian concert pianist, a published author, and an accomplished composer. His work for piano and string quartet, Les Noces Rouge (The Red Wedding), will have its first West Coast performance at the Music@Menlo festival in California on July 26 and 28.
The Viano Quartet will be joined by the composer at the piano. Hough spoke with Classical Gas podcast host Gail Wein about the music and its inspiration – the book My Ántonia by one of his favorite authors, Willa Cather, pictured at right.
Cather (1873-1847) is a Pulitzer Prize winning American writer known for her novels of life on the Great Plains, including O Pioneers! and The Song of the Lark as well as My Ántonia.
Hough said that in My Ántonia there is a story-within-a-story that really caught his imagination, a vignette about a pair of Russian brothers who fled from their hometown to the plains of Nebraska after a horrific incident.
Hough’s compositional approach balances a blow-by-blow description of the action with sections that simply evoke a mood.
The work was commissioned by David Finckel and Wu Han for Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. The two are artistic directors of the Society and they are in their final season as directors of Music@Menlo.
The novel tells the stories of an orphaned boy from Virginia, Jim Burden, and the elder daughter in a family of Bohemian immigrants, Ántonia Shimerda, who are each brought as children to be pioneers in Nebraska towards the end of the 19th century. The first year in the very new place leaves strong impressions on both children, affecting them for life.
This novel is considered Cather’s first masterpiece. She was praised for bringing the American West to life and making it personally interesting.
