Hough and the Dallas Symphony Orchestra under Andrew Litton now commit to disc a work that they premiered in 2005, George Tsontakis’s piano concerto Man of Sorrows.
The detachment of the brittle solo line high above the Dallas musicians floats as a lonely soul above murky humanity. Messiaen’s bird song twitters in the piano’s clipped statements, but a tendency to self-conscious eclecticism – Beethoven here, Bernstein there – squanders the work’s effectiveness. The rest of the CD features solo piano classics by Schoenberg, Berg and Webern. Hough captures the fleeting whimsy of these variations to a tee.
(Hyperion)