In the Night

In the Night

• New Store Stock

The latest recital album by Stephen Hough, ''the thinking person's virtuoso'' (The New York Times), takes the listener on a journey through that most intense and absorbing of nineteenth-century obsessions, the night. The Romantic night was one without sleep; where experiences are mutated through darkness. Hough's thoughtful programming creates a new aural sphere for some of the most celebrated piano works in the repertoire. Hough explores Schumann's troubled, reeling In der Nacht, and continues with Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata and two Chopin Nocturnes. Also included is Stephen Hough's own Piano Sonata No.2, subtitled Notturno Luminoso, which he describes as, ''about a different kind of night... the brightness of a brash city in the hours of darkness; the loneliness of pre-morning; sleeplessness and the dull glow of the alarm clock's unmoving hours; the irrational fears which are only darkened by the harsh glare of a suspended, dusty light bulb.''