Stephen Hough
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.3 • 14.3K Ratings
🗓️ 9 October 2016
⏱️ 37 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Kirsty Young's castaway is the concert pianist and composer Stephen Hough.
He discovered he liked playing the piano when he went to visit his aunt's house and could pick out more than one hundred nursery rhymes on her piano. After much pestering, his parents bought him a cheap second hand piano from an antique shop. He went on to become one of the youngest students at the Royal Northern College of Music before winning a scholarship to The Juilliard School in New York.
His career began in 1983 after winning the Naumberg Piano Competition. He divides his time between New York and London and performs all over the world. He also has a prolific recording career and has won many awards for his discs.
Producer: Sarah Taylor.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the BBC. |
| 0:04.0 | Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. |
| 0:06.0 | Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Discs from BBC Radio 4. |
| 0:10.0 | For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast. |
| 0:15.0 | For more information about the program please visit BBC.co. |
| 0:20.0 | UK slash Radio 4. My castaway this week is the pianist Stephen Huff. He's been performing at the very highest level for decades now, with worldwide |
| 0:45.3 | appearances at every major concert hall, 25 proms, a catalogue of over 50 recordings, and an almost |
| 0:51.8 | laughable number of awards to his name. |
| 0:54.5 | His considerable abilities then are clear for all to hear, but as he exits stage left, his |
| 1:00.2 | accomplishments continue. |
| 1:01.9 | He writes, paints and compers too being proclaimed by the economist |
| 1:05.6 | one of the world's 20 living polymaths. |
| 1:08.2 | You can imagine his childhood, can't you? |
| 1:10.4 | Highly intellectual, highly strong musical appearance, obsessively coaching their tiny son, and his teenage years devoted to an |
| 1:17.5 | abstemious life dominated by endless practice. |
| 1:20.5 | Nope, it wasn't like that at all. He spent a long time begging his parents to even buy him a piano. |
| 1:26.0 | They eventually got a second-hand one for a fiver. Later at New York's prestigious Juilliard School of Music, |
| 1:31.6 | he'd while away his days hanging around the corridors smoking cigarettes. |
| 1:36.0 | He says now, when I'm playing these great works, it's almost like being a priest or a rabbi. |
| 1:41.6 | You're dealing with areas of human life, you can't put your finger on. |
| 1:44.8 | I love that there are no words. |
| 1:47.6 | When I'm on that stage, it doesn't matter. |
... |
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