This disc was nominated for the 1999 Grammy Award for "Best Instrumental Soloist without Orchestra." George Tsontakis' 'Ghost Variations' was nominated for the Award for "Best Contemporary Classical Composition."
Stephen Hough is an English pianist of uncommon gifts and exacting tastes who spends half of his time in London. The other six months of the year he resides on Manhattan's upper west side, very much the heart of the matter in NEW YORK VARIATIONS. The "matter" here is twentieth century American piano music of an angular, bold, declamatory nature, an urban style featuring clean, strong lines which seem to echo the architecture in whose midst they were written.
Copland's 'Piano Variations,' a true classic, is couched in a tougher, more dissonant voice than his better known music from the thirties and forties. Ben Weber, one of the first American composers to embrace serialism, seems to be looking both fore and aft in his 'Fantasia,' with hectoring episodes in a framework of post-romantic warmth. The longest work on the disk, the 'Ghost Variations' of George Tsontakis, is an epic and occasionally comic piece of time travel which transcends the merely clever in the depiction of a haunted world. John Corigliano's 'Etude Fantasy' squares off this bracing program, brilliantly played by Hough and presented with Hyperion's usual distinction.
