Stephen Hough’s ‘French Album,’ A ‘Musical Dessert Trolley’

As with food, as with fashion, as with film, there does seem to be a distinct French style when it comes to composition. The much-heralded English pianist Stephen Hough has been studying what makes a piece of music uniquely French. It’s resulted in his latest collection: the French Album.

With works by Debussy, Faure, Poulenc and a number of lesser-known composers, Hough says he considers this new album “a sort of musical dessert trolley.”

“There are some impressionist pieces, but it’s a kind of romantic impressionism as well,” Hough says. “Impressionism we sometimes think as being rather cool somehow and distant. But this is music of a voluptuousness, of that kind of Frenchness: the smell of the French cigarette, the smear of lipstick on the collar and slightly too much perfume, that whole Parisian theme that’s so fascinating to us all.”