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George Tsontakis is a name that carries some weight on the American music scene. At 55, he has chalked up the sort of awards that fellow composers dream of. Two years ago, he received Louisville's Grawemeyer Award of US$200,000 ($278,000) and has just taken up the three-year tenure of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Charles Ives Living ($225,000).
Yet outside the United States, his profile is low. Now Stephen Hough, the British pianist who tackled Tsontakis' Ghost Variations on disc in 1998, presents us with his Man of Sorrows, coupled with piano works from the Second Viennese School.
Man of Sorrows is an expansive 40 minutes, a tone poem for piano and orchestra with, in the composer's words, a religious dynamic and complexity.
There is colossal assurance in the way Tsontakis measures out his material. He is not afraid of the sumptuous and Hough is allowed to glitter, which he does with élan. Some ears will pick the Beethoven references that Tsontakis admits to; others will be drawn to the later collision of Stravinsky and Rachmaninov. Inevitably, one hears the world of Messiaen, particularly in Hough's incisive playing while, in the background, the orchestra counters with imposing and resolutely orthodox tonality. This builds up to a heart-stopping climax towards the end of the second movement.
The estimable Dallas Symphony Orchestra with conductor Andrew Litton, who squired Hough in his 2004 set of Rachmaninov Concertos, make it a memorable, full-blooded occasion.
The disc is completed by Hough, solo, presenting Schoenberg and his two most famous pupils. The six miniatures of Schoenberg's Opus 19 are enticing wisps, a series of musical questions answered by Alban Berg's Sonata which has all the subtle voicings we were given when Hough played it in Auckland three years ago.
Webern's Variations are far from the forbidding experience that some pianists make of them and, by closing the disc with Tsontakis' 2003 Sarabesque, which comes across as a bit of trailer for Man of Sorrows, Hough tempts us to go back to track one and revisit the composer's magnum opus.
Tsontakis, Man of Sorrows (Hyperion CDA 67564, through Ode Records)
