From precocious child to polymath – Stephen Hough’s life is full of singularity

At what point did the ponderous autobiography get edged out by the slinky elliptical memoir? Perhaps around the stage we all realised that, as Stephen Hough puts it, ‘a complete autobiography is usually boring or indecent. It’s the person at the dinner table who just won’t stop talking’.

There’s certainly no holding forth (though perhaps just a little indecency) here. Hough, one senses, is more likely to be the man at the table looking on wryly, silent until, pressed,  he’ll mention the time he just happened to end up playing the vibraphone ‘with Oscar Peterson’s trio on the telly’ or the two occasions he ‘seriously considered leaving the piano behind and becoming a priest’; or perhaps the moment he was snubbed by Leonard Bernstein (while himself failing to notice Greta Garbo), or the story of ‘Aunt’ Liz, who was in love with his father but sometimes shared a bed with his mother.