Penguin Guide Rosette Winners

2010

“The music of Federico Mompou may appear at first to consist of little more than charming, delicately scented but dilettantish salon near-improvisations with marked overtones of Erik Satie; but it's significant that his earliest works (in the 1920s) are imbued with a sense of mystery and wonder.
Later he was to progress from an ingenuous lyricism (in the Songs and dances) to a profounder contemplation and mysticism, to greater harmonic and keyboard complexity ( Dialogues) and finally, in the 1946-60 Paisajes ('Landscapes'), to a more experimental, less tonal idiom. In the hands of an imaginative pianist like Stephen Hough this other-worldly quality becomes revelatory.
Hough's command of tonal nuance throughout is ultra-sensitive, he catches Mompou's wistful moods to perfection, and on the rare occasions when the music lashes out, as in Prelude No 7, he's scintillating. In the more familiar Songs and dances he's tender in the songs and crisp rhythmically in the dances. He treats the 'Testament d'Amelia' in No 8 with a good deal of flexibility, and because Mompou declared (and demonstrated in his own recordings) that 'it's all so free', he takes the fullest advantage of the marking senza rigore in No 5, which reflects Mompou's lifelong fascination with bell sounds.”

“In the hands of an imaginative pianist like Stephen Hough this other-worldly, almost eremitic [music] becomes revelatory. He catches Mompou's wistful moods to perfection”

2011 edition

“[Hough] is completely inside Mompou's fastidious, Satie-esque sound-world and understands the absorbed influences which make this music as much French as Spanish...Not even Mompou himself equalled, let alone surpassed, Hough in this repertoire.”