To the reader, few things are more wonderful than an unexpectedly good book. Every so often a title will come along and place itself uninvited in the stream of life, almost daring us to ignore it. We pick it up with a sort of pleasant reluctance, assuring ourselves that we’ll read only the first few pages to “see what it’s like.” Yet when we put the book down—hours or days later—we cannot imagine ever having lived without it. It’s as if our minds have been waiting for the book to appear, carving out a corner of our minds into which its pages can pour.  

Stefan Zweig’s 1942 memoir The World of Yesterday was one such book for me. I perused the cover with lukewarm interest, flipped through a few pages, and nearly placed it aside for something else. Twenty-four hours later, I was immersed in the magnetic atmosphere of Zweig’s exhilarating life. His account of the Europe of yesterday—Europe before the world wars, that is—and the subsequent impact of those wars on the culture he strove to preserve is simply unforgettable.  

I was therefore pleasantly surprised to discover, only a few days after finishing the book, a February 2025 recording of a piano concerto composed by the British pianist Stephen Hough titled The World of Yesterday. Recorded with the Hallé Orchestra under Sir Mark Elder, the concerto was released on the Hyperion label alongside two of Hough’s smaller compositions, a three-movement Sonatina nostalgica and a five-movement Partita.  

First, a word about Hough. I referred to him as a pianist, but that is somewhat of a misleading description. Hough is one of those rare people who fall into the category of “polymath.” As a pianist, he tours the world performing the most virtuosic piano music ever written. As a composer, he has written a piano concerto, several string quartets, multiple piano works, and an entire song cycle. As a writer of nonfiction, he has published a memoir and numerous essays on music, culture, and religion. And as a writer of fiction, he has published the acclaimed novel The Final Retreat. One wonders if Hough has found a way to increase the number of hours in a day.  

Daylight aside, Hough’s latest achievement is the composition and recording of The World of Yesterday. The work began when a film director asked Hough to compose a twelve-minute piece for a film score. The film was going to be about an early twentieth-century Austrian baroness who commissions a young American composer to come to her castle in the Austrian Alps and finish composing a piece of music begun by her late sister. The film ultimately did not progress, but Hough used the material he sketched for the film score to create the concerto. Thus one can hear, in the second movement, a decadent, almost Straussian waltz evocative of turn-of-the-century Vienna—the exact world Zweig so eloquently recreates in his memoir.  

Hough introduces the primary theme of the concerto in the opening bars of the first movement, a spacious, reflective melody in which one can hear the openness of Copland and the sweeping romanticism of Korngold. After the orchestral introduction, the piano launches into a virtuosic cadenza that lasts for the rest of the movement. Here one has a front-row seat to both Hough’s virtuosity as a performer and his deep knowledge of the piano concerto repertoire. The cadenza seems to encapsulate the pianistic brilliance of Rachmaninoff, the imposing grandeur of Tchaikovsky, the sensitivity of Chopin, the imagination of Prokofiev, and the hair-raising fireworks of Babajanyan. It is, in a word, staggering.  

The second movement soars into a mysterious, romantic waltz over which the piano glistens in incandescent runs and dips. Again I thought of Rachmaninoff, and of Strauss. I also thought of coffee, of snowcapped mountains, even of jazz. Not to mention Prokofiev, whose Classical Symphony does exactly what Hough does here: present a period-appropriate musical form (like a waltz) in a contemporary harmonic and rhythmic texture.   

Both the initial Copland-esque theme and the secondary waltz theme are revisited in the third movement, which tumbles and weaves through a high-energy finale. The music feels as if it is being propelled, almost thrown, toward a dazzling future, and I thought of Zweig’s description of the cultural sentiment in pre–World War I Austria: “[People] honestly thought that divergences between nations and religious faiths would gradually flow into a sense of common humanity, so that peace and security, the greatest of goods, would come to all mankind.”  

If The World of Yesterday is not a perfect concerto, it is close. By expertly blending the past and the present, Hough has created something both relatable and truly original. Every listening reveals new layers of musical history, as if Hough has built the great pianists of the past into the foundation of his work. Yet at no point does the music feel derivative. Nor does Hough succumb to the temptation to make the music more modern, more edgy, or less structured than it needs to be. Instead, he has channeled the immense breadth of the piano repertoire into the lens of Zweig’s prewar Europe and in doing so created an atmospheric bridge between the past and present. The World of Yesterday is a masterly achievement, and we are fortunate to have it.