Stephen Hough’s new piano concerto is called The World of Yesterday but its second ever performance offered a dispiriting glimpse into the world of tomorrow. A couple of minutes into the finale Hough stopped playing and the orchestra fell silent. ‘I’m very sorry,’ he explained. ‘My iPad is going crazy.’ A murmur of sympathy, mingled with laughter; then Hough signalled to the conductor Mark Wigglesworth and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra and they carried on, this time without mishap. But we’d seen it happen, and until last week I’d have told you it was inconceivable.
This wasn’t some rash experiment: professional musicians have been using electronic scores for well over a decade, generally without problems. The Pavel Haas Quartet played from digital tablets at the Wigmore Hall in January (they used pedals to turn the pages). But why hadn’t Hough memorised his own concerto, you ask? There are many reasons why soloists sometimes prefer to stick with the score – as a backstop; as a means of assisting the other performers; or simply to avoid wasting mental bandwidth on a piece that they might only perform once or twice. Memorisation can be useful, but it can also be a fetish. If it’s a highwire act you’re after, you might be happier at the circus.
Regardless, there was something especially disheartening about this particular crash. After all, this is Hough we’re talking about. In piano terms, he’s an Olympian, a Nureyev-level genius: to hear him in full flight is to witness human physical and mental prowess at its summit. This is what peak performance looks like, and we’d just seen it derailed by some blinking, smirking box of tech-bro tricks.
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