Named by The Economist as one of twenty living polymaths, Sir Stephen Hough combines the distinguished career of a concert pianist with those of a composer and writer. In recognition of his contribution to cultural life, he became the first classical performer to be given a MacArthur Fellowship, and was awarded a knighthood for Services to Music in the Queen’s Birthday Honours of 2022.

In a career spanning over forty years, Hough has played regularly with most of the world’s leading orchestras, including televised and filmed appearances with the Berlin, London, China, Seoul and New York Philharmonic Orchestras, and the Concertgebouw, Budapest Festival and NHK Symphony Orchestras. He has been a regular guest of recital series and festivals including Carnegie Hall’s Stern Auditorium, London’s Royal Festival Hall, Salzburg, Verbier, La Roque-d’Anthéron, Aspen, Tanglewood, Aldeburgh and Edinburgh. Hough’s 2024/25 concert season began with his thirtieth appearance at the BBC Proms, performing at the Last Night of the Proms to a live audience of 6,000 and a televised audience of 3.5 million.

Hough’s discography of seventy recordings has garnered awards such as the Diapason d’Or de l’Année, several Grammy nominations and eight Gramophone Awards, including Record of the Year and the Gold Disc. For Hyperion he has recorded the complete piano concertos of Beethoven, Brahms, Liszt, Mendelssohn, Rachmaninov, Saint-Saëns and Tchaikovsky as well as celebrated solo recordings of Brahms’s final piano works, Chopin’s complete nocturnes, waltzes, ballades and scherzos, and recitals of Schumann, Schubert, Franck, Debussy, Mompou and Liszt.

As a composer, Hough’s Fanfare Toccata was commissioned for the 2022 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition and performed by all thirty competitors. His 2021 String Quartet No 1 ‘Les Six rencontres’ was written for and recorded by the Takács Quartet for Hyperion. The premiere of Hough’s Willa Cather-inspired Piano Quintet, at Lincoln Center’s David Geffen Hall, followed the 2024 first performance of his Piano Concerto ‘The world of yesterday’, which he brings to the Adelaide, Bournemouth, Oregon, Singapore and Vermont Symphony Orchestras. Hough’s songs and choral and instrumental works have been commissioned by the Musée du Louvre, National Gallery (London), Westminster Abbey, Westminster Cathedral, Wigmore Hall, the Genesis Foundation, Gilmore International Keyboard Festival, the Walter W Naumburg Foundation, BBC Sounds and the Berlin Philharmonic Wind Quintet. His music is published by Josef Weinberger Ltd.

As an author, Hough’s memoir Enough: Scenes from Childhood was published by Faber & Faber in 2023. It follows his 2019 collection of essays Rough Ideas: Reflections on Music and More which received a Royal Philharmonic Society Award and was named one of the Financial Times’s Books of the Year. His novel The Final Retreat was published in 2018 (Sylph Editions). He has also written for The New York Times, The Telegraph, The Times, The Guardian and the Evening Standard. Hough is an Honorary Bencher of the Middle Temple, an Honorary Member of the Royal Philharmonic Society, an Honorary Fellow of Cambridge University’s Girton College, the International Chair of Piano Studies and a Companion of the Royal Northern College of Music, and is on the faculty of The Juilliard School in New York.