The composer and performer on why his new album has mortality at its core

The Panama is the first thing to catch your eye with its jaunty striped band, then the summer shirt beneath. At first glance the cover picture of pianist Stephen Hough’s latest disc seems all holidays and sunshine – Neapolitan song-transcriptions, perhaps, or Liszt’s musical sketchbook of his travels? But then you see the title – Vida Breve (Brief Life) – and musical skies cloud swiftly over.

Hough didn’t set out to make a recital about death during a pandemic, it just sort of happened that way. “It’s quite a strange chance, isn’t it? Unless of course you feel we ought to be distracting ourselves from all this right now…” he tells me on the phone from his home in north London.

The core of the programme – Chopin’s unsettling Piano Sonata No. 2 in B flat minor (traditionally subtitled “Funeral March”) and Bach’s monumental “Chaconne”, transcribed for piano by Ferruccio Busoni – joined Hough’s concert repertoire back in 2019, becoming the keystones of a programme that grew gradually outwards to consider death in all its aspects.