Stephen Hough Zitate auf Englisch

Zitat des Tages von Stephen Hough:

Playing the piano is incredibly personal... But when it's your own piece, it's doubly so.

I don't watch television! At least not when I'm traveling. For some reason, I have always found it depressing to watch television in hotel rooms. I try to use that time, as well as time on planes, to write.

Stephen Hough

I remember, in school during English lessons, I would ask the teacher what were the most difficult books to read, and when she'd say 'Ulysses' or something, I'd run off to the library to check out a copy, eager to attempt the most difficult mountain.

Stephen Hough

I have had a place in New York in the musicians' district on the Upper West Side since 1986.

Stephen Hough

A priest once said to me, 'Think of a priest going to the altar as you walk out on the stage.' I would hate to think that anyone thought I was coming to preach. But art and music open up things that you can't put into words. It's about bringing joy when you go out there.

Stephen Hough

Many people who don't like Rachmaninov's style consider the 'Rhapsody' his masterpiece. It's written fantastically well for orchestra and piano. He combines a lot of effervescence with a deep, Romantic spirit.

Stephen Hough

Life is an incurable disease leading to death, but it's also an unrequested gift, which, if we can manage to keep giving it away to others, can keep giving back everything to us.

Stephen Hough

I enjoy painting. It's an incredible release of tension, and I feel very excited doing it. I squeeze out some wonderful red paint, and I get a thrill. My heart starts beating faster. It's almost a sensual thing working with these thick acrylic paints. I almost want to put my hands in.

Stephen Hough

The piano is an instrument that can easily sound overly thick, and I love to think that I can work with textures - particularly the inner textures inside the melody or the bass line. There is an analogy there with painting; I love paintings where you see colour underneath the colour and, underneath that, more texture and shape.

Stephen Hough

Discovering how to spend leisure time well, especially during a time of austerity, could be as important in the effort to reduce crime as having extra police on the streets, and increasing the population of concert halls may actually help decrease the population of prisons.

Stephen Hough

Freedom comes with the impossibility of choosing.

Stephen Hough

Painting is just a hobby. I really don't think of it much more than that. But writing music and writing words... my life would feel as if it had a big hole if I took those away.

Stephen Hough

The 'Missa Mirabilis' is a big work which was conceived for a large organ and a lot of singers.

Stephen Hough

To me, spirituality is the everyday stuff which we're dealing with all the time. It's not going into some ecstatic trance. It's changing a nappy, or making a meal at the end of a very tiring day.

Stephen Hough

There are many doors to the heart.

Stephen Hough

I was out of the U.K. as a care-free, fun-loving student for much of Mrs. Thatcher's time in Downing Street, and as I didn't own a television in New York, never read the newspapers, and am old enough to have lived before the Internet, she is a shadowy figure in my memory.

Stephen Hough

I wanted to be a monk at some time in my life, or a priest, so there was a kind of reflex quite early on not to be attached to anything that might be taken away.

Stephen Hough

Why do people compose music? Why do people listen to music? When we go into a concert, we go into a place where we want to experience a sort of ecstasy, to come out of ourselves.

Stephen Hough

I don't listen to music a lot in that I rarely sit down and put on a CD because I really want to treasure the silence that is there when I'm not practising. But when I listen to a piece, I listen to it often.

Stephen Hough

I've loved Alfred Cortot's playing from an early age, and I never tire of hearing his recordings, particularly Chopin and Schumann from the 1920s and '30s.

Stephen Hough

I think the actual art of expressing yourself is a very important part of being human. And an important part of being a performer is understanding what it's like to create yourself.

Stephen Hough

I want music to move me, and I don't think it can do that without at least a link to tonality. It's the tug between atonal and tonal which makes music poignant.

Stephen Hough

All things of beauty can speak to us of God, and I'm very happy to listen to and be inspired by people of every religious background.

Stephen Hough

I love my painting - it fills me with passion. But it's not something I expect anyone else to love.

Stephen Hough

The things I do outside of playing the piano are done out of an inner necessity, not just because I want to try my hand at different things.

Stephen Hough

I haven't studied theology in any systematic way. I don't think I'd find certain subjects - canon law, for instance - terribly interesting. But I'm always picking around and finding different things.

Stephen Hough

In anything, there has to be that moment of fasting, really, in order to enjoy the feast.

Stephen Hough

I think it all comes from the same source, really, the writing of music, the writing of words, the playing of music. It's what drives anyone to be interested in the arts. I think it's a poetic gene; it's a wanting to go beyond.

Stephen Hough

I don't think of faith as something that's like a rock, that never changes. I think it's something that's very fluid, always changing.

Stephen Hough

Learning great works like the Liszt Sonata or Beethoven's 'Hammerklavier' should be a struggle to a certain extent, where you need to labor intensely with your own brain and soul for the meaning of the work instead of cutting and pasting a bunch of stuff together from the Internet and - boom! - there you are with a performance ready to go.

Stephen Hough

Bach and Beethoven erected temples and churches on the heights. I only wanted to build dwellings for men in which they might feel happy and at home.

Stephen Hough

I would do a sort of violence to myself if I didn't express myself in the directly creative ways of writing, both words and music.

Stephen Hough

Most people are at a concert because they want to be inspired, entertained, moved; we musicians have the mission to be bringers of joy, of ecstasy.

Stephen Hough

I was only listening to rock music, burning joss sticks in my bedroom, wanting only to be a disc jockey, and watching six hours of television a night - the worst kind of teenage alienation.

Stephen Hough

Playing the piano is incredibly personal... But when it's your own piece, it's doubly so.

Stephen Hough

I didn't want to look back in 10 or 20 years and say, 'Yes, I always wanted to write that piano sonata or that novel, but I never had time.'

Stephen Hough

I love teaching.

Stephen Hough