Partita (Hough)
Movements
i Overture ii Capriccio iii Canción y Danza I iv Canción y Danza II v Toccata
Notes
Hough currently enjoys a celebrated career as a concert pianist, composer, and writer. He had written 4 serious piano sonatas prior to the Partita, and here, in his own words, he has created ‘something brighter, something more celebratory, something more nostalgic’.
The two Cancion y Danzas were inspired by the Catalan composer Federico Mompou, and form the more melancholic centre of the work. The others, bearing now-almost-archaic titles, toy with musical elements of their traditional namesake: the pompous dotted rhythms and fugal counterpoint in the Overture, the mercurial Capriccio, and the brilliantly virtuosic Toccata. The 3 central movements, in particular, were built largely on the interval of a fifth, while the outer movements ‘suggest the world of a grand cathedral organ’.