Stephen Hough: We're All Here on This Planet, Doing the Best We Can
Stephen Hough — British pianist, composer and writer, and Artistic Director and Chair of the Jury of the Leeds International Piano Competition — joins us for The Riff Questionnaire.
 | By Lucy Cheung 09 November 2026 |
Applications for the 2027 Leeds International Piano Competition closed on 31 October. When I spoke to Stephen Hough recently, he told me that the competition had received more than 800 applications, over twice as many as for the previous edition. Almost half came from East and Southeast Asia, and the applicants had proposed 127 different concertos by 80 composers. “I don't think I could name you 127 concertos,” he remarked.
This is the first competition under Hough’s direction as Artistic Director and Chair of the Jury, and he is introducing a number of changes, including the removal of prescribed repertoire for the first time in its history and raising the upper age limit to 35. These are not simply changes to the rules. They reflect his thinking about music education, the development of young musicians, and what a piano competition should really be about.
Earlier this spring, I met Hough outside a little juice bar on a street corner near his home. We sat there and chatted for over an hour. It was a rare gap between concerts for the pianist, composer and writer, something of a frequent flyer, who was also preparing to give talks about his memoir, Rough Ideas – the title, of course, playing on his surname, Hough. Among the subjects we discussed were the pressure on young musicians to achieve success early, and the tendency to measure their potential by competition results and public recognition. Hough is strongly opposed to the idea that if someone has not achieved something significant by the age of eighteen, they are unlikely to amount to much later in life. Everyone develops at a different pace, he believes, and young musicians should not be labelled too early.
He also worries that some young musicians become so preoccupied with competition results and public recognition that they forget why they first took up an instrument: because they loved music. At Juilliard, where he teaches, he once met an eighteen-year-old student who immediately asked which competition he should enter. Hough asked him, “But do you want to win?” The student looked surprised. He went on: “Do you want to play 80 to 100 concerts a year? Do you want to be travelling all year round? Is this the lifestyle you want?” For Hough, entering a competition also means thinking seriously about the career that might follow, and whether it is really the life a young musician wants.
Hough has not been in London for some time, so when I spoke to him again recently, it was over Zoom. He was in Sydney, having just finished dinner. As he appeared on screen, I recognised the Zoom background he had been using for the past few years: Roy Lichtenstein’s Whaam! “It's like Beethoven. It makes a real impact,” he said.
We will share the full conversations with Hough, from our meeting in London to our more recent exchange online, during next year's Leeds International Piano Competition. For now, here is a selection of questions from The Riff Questionnaire.
What is your idea of perfect happiness?
I think perfect happiness comes when you're not looking for it. And maybe when you're trying to make other people happy, you find happiness yourself.
Which quality do you most admire in others?
Honesty. In a musician, I think a sense of being direct, so that there's no artifice there. Honesty would probably be the most important thing.
What would your ideal day look like if you had absolutely no work to do?
I'd have a large, long breakfast, reading, then I'd go for a walk. Then I'd like to do some work. I don't like to have any day of my life when I do no work at all, but it would probably be writing. So composing, a little bit of work. Possibly a light lunch, maybe a little nap, maybe a massage. See some friends, another walk.
I'm thinking of holiday days, which I don't get very often, but I can enjoy the day just going by, and I'm very happy with just letting everything unravel.
What is your greatest extravagance?
In the past, I bought quite a lot of very expensive hats. I'm talking really, like, $700 or $800 handmade hats. I've still got them, but I don't wear them as much any more. So that's probably still that extravagance.
But probably the really ongoing one is that I eat out every day of the year. I never cook at home. I think that is an extravagance because I spend a lot of money doing that when, if I had something in the fridge, I could rustle up a meal. But there we are.
Who are your heroes in real life?
I don't really have any heroes as such. But I'm interested in people who are not in the public eye. I meet a lot of very famous people all the time. I'm working with famous conductors and meeting colleagues and other writers. But actually, the people who impress me most are sometimes very ordinary people, people who bring joy to other people's lives.
You could be working at a supermarket checkout and actually have a greater impact on someone's life than I have playing a concert at the Sydney Opera House.
For me, as an artist, this is a very important way of being brought back to reality. We have people telling us all the time that we do wonderful things: “I really love your playing”, “I heard your recording and it was wonderful.” And I think we can get terribly caught up in that. It's very nice, and I'm grateful when people say nice things, but it's also a lot of nonsense.
I also think of the people here in my hotel who are cleaning my room. In a sense, my heroes come from unexpected places. I always want to keep the door open. We're all here on this planet, you know, doing the best we can, sometimes in very difficult circumstances, and I think it's important not to forget that.
If you could invite someone from history to dinner, who would it be?
I'd love to have dinner with Liszt, I think. Although I'm not so good at having dinners one to one, because I'm actually quite shy. We'd need to have somebody else there. Just me and Liszt, I'd be really intimidated.
I love his music. He's the most important person in any pianist's life because he really created the modern piano with its technique. Him and Chopin. I'd say Chopin too, but I think Chopin might not be such a nice man. He was a bit self-absorbed. Liszt was a very open-hearted, generous kind of man.
And I'd love to go to Mass with Liszt. That would be a real treat. We could go together to St Peter's in Rome and sit together, me and Liszt.
Is there a piece of music you love deeply but would never want to perform in public?
At my stage and my age now, there are lots of pieces that, if I were thirty years younger, I might play. Some obscure ones, like Kenneth Leighton's Second Piano Concerto. There's an unusual one for you. I'd love to play more Medtner. I don't think I'll play very much more, although I am thinking of learning one of the sonatas, actually. Fauré – I love Fauré. Quite a lot of big chamber works that I might not be able to play in the future.
But it would be the Hammerklavier. I wish I'd learned that when I was twenty. It's too late to learn that now. The same with some of the big concertos. I wish I'd learned more concertos when I was young. That would have been very useful professionally.
I've got a lot of other things going on in my mind now, really, and writing music is taking a much bigger part. In fact, this morning, or this afternoon, I think I've now finished my Requiem. I haven't shown it to anybody. I've sent it off to a conductor friend who offered to look at it, just to look at the orchestration and things like that. It's very nearly finished. It's been almost two years writing that. I want to do that. That's what I want to spend all my extra time doing: writing more music.
If you could possess one skill you don't already have, what would it be?
Speak Chinese. My languages are so bad. I would love to be able to go to China and speak to people in their own language. And also to read the literature, the poetry particularly.
I've read some Chinese poetry in translation, alongside the characters, with explanations of what was going on and the images, and I find that whole world fascinating. But it's basically closed to me because I obviously can't understand the language.
I can't remember which poem it was. It was a very interesting book that someone gave me, and it was a famous old poem from hundreds of years ago. I think there were twenty different translations of this poem. It was a very short, aphoristic poem. I was fascinated because every one of the English versions was completely different, but they were all translations of this one Chinese poem.
I thought what's interesting about Chinese poetry, which is different from Western poetry, is that the reader really has to be a poet. You read that poetry and you are part of the process of the poem, which is beautiful, really. You're very active, and that's what I want audiences to be. I don't want audiences just to sit back and let the sound wash over them. I want them to reach forward and listen actively.
If you were stranded on a desert island, which three bodies of music would you take with you?
If I had a piano on a desert island, I might take Bach's Preludes and Fugues, because I've only learned a few when I was a student. I never played any Bach professionally, so I think that would be a good opportunity to do that.
Also Chopin's Études. I've played a handful of them, but it would be nice to do them all because they're so great.
What else? Maybe the complete keyboard music of William Byrd. I've played a few of those pieces, but there's certainly plenty there to keep me busy.
What has been your favourite journey?
Coming to Sydney for the first time was really an eye-opener because I'd never been before. This was in 1991. I arrived at the airport here at eight o'clock in the morning, and it was the most gorgeous sunny day, a summer day. I fell in love with Australia from that moment. And here I am, talking to you today from the same city. So maybe I would say that.
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