The primary question I am asked that comes with a simple answer.
I just wanted to see what a long bass string sounded like.
It occurred to me that long bass strings sounded better. When I was 14 I asked my piano teacher how long a bass a string would need to be if it had no copper on it at all. The answer was “Adrian the string would be so long it would go on for ever!” so with this in mind I did an experiment where I could find that measurement.
I knocked a waratah (metal fence post) into the ground at both ends and with a big piece of timber with a hole and tuning pin in it I strung up an enormous bass string. After finding a safe tension I tuned it to the lowest A on a piano by moving rocks along the wire.
FOLLOWING on from his recording of Beethoven piano concertos, Stephen Hough’s new work is a concept album in which themes of life and death are explored in an intellectual master class from one the Britain s finest pianists and abstract painting. As Hough is keen to point out, the image of a dead man hanging on a cross is arguably the foundational icon of Western culture.
Works for solo piano by JS Bach, Franz Liszt, Ferruccio Busoni, Frederic Chopin and Hough’s own compositions are the basis for this recital recording made at St Silas the Martyr Church in Kentish Town in London.