Stephen Andrew Gill Hough was born on 22 November 1961 at Heswall on the Wirral and grew up in Thelwall, starting piano lessons at five; his father, Australian-born, worked as a technical representative for British Steel and died at fifty-four. He could recite around a hundred nursery rhymes as a small child, and after much pleading his parents bought a second-hand piano from a local antique shop for five pounds. At twelve a mugging brought on what he has called a mini-nervous breakdown and cost him nearly a year of school. He studied at Chetham’s School of Music — which he later said was not a wonderful place while he was there — and at the Royal Northern College of Music, and holds a master’s degree from Juilliard, taken on the first Royal Philharmonic Society Julius Isserlis Scholarship. His teachers were Heather Slade-Lipkin, Gordon Green, Adele Marcus, Martin Canin and Derrick Wyndham.

He won the piano section of the BBC Young Musician of the Year as a finalist in 1978, the Terence Judd Award in 1982 and first prize at the Naumburg International Piano Competition in New York in 1983. Alongside a major career as a soloist he composes and transcribes, programmes his own music in recital, and has published more than thirty pieces. His cello concerto for Steven Isserlis was premiered in 2007, the year Westminster Abbey and Westminster Cathedral each performed a mass he had written for them; members of the Berlin Philharmonic gave the trio for piccolo, contrabassoon and piano at the Philharmonie in 2009, and members of The Prince Consort premiered the song cycles Herbstlieder, Other Love Songs and Dappled Things. He gave the first performance of his Sonata for Piano (broken branches) at Wigmore Hall in 2011, the Indianapolis Symphony premiered the orchestrated Missa Mirabilis in 2012, and he wrote Fanfare Toccata as the test piece for the 2022 Van Cliburn competition.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Hough
• https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1243635