Music@Menlo to Present West Coast Premiere of

Sir Stephen Hough’s Piano Quintet, Les Noces Rouges

ATHERTON, CA (June 4, 2026) — Music@Menlo will present the West Coast premiere of Sir Stephen Hough’s Piano Quintet, Les Noces Rouges, as part of its 2026 summer festival, Redux. The festival is a celebratory retrospective of David Finckel and Wu Han’s 24-years as Artistic Directors of Music@Menlo and marks their final season in the role.

Les Noces Rouges will be featured in Concert Program IV, “The Unfolding of Music,” with performances on Sunday, July 26 at 4:00 p.m. and Tuesday, July 28 at 7:00 p.m. at the Spieker Center for the Arts. Hough—an internationally acclaimed pianist, composer, and author—makes his Music@Menlo debut in this program, joining the Viano Quartet for the performance of his Piano Quintet.

The “Unfolding of Music” program is inspired by Music@Menlo’s inaugural festival in 2003—originally conceived as a sweeping “road map” of chamber music from the mid-seventeenth century to the present. The program traces the same expansive arc within a single concert, journeying from the Baroque brilliance of Georg Philipp Telemann to Hough’s contemporary voice, illuminating centuries of musical evolution in a single evening.

About Les Noces Rouges

Drawing inspiration from a vignette in Willa Cather’s novel My Ántonia, Les Noces Rouges reflects the story of brothers Pavel and Peter. In a note on the piece, Hough writes:

“The inspiration of literature on non-vocal, instrumental music is varied and extensive. It can follow a precise path of equivalence, like Strauss’ Don Quixote, or it can evoke a more general atmosphere, as with Liszt’s Après une lecture de Dante. My piano quintet falls somewhere between these two examples.”

Sir Stephen found the story to be “the perfect outline for a macabre tone poem”: a Russian wedding, a drunken banquet afterward, and a subsequent snowy sleigh ride across the steppes and a grisly “murder by wolves” brought about by the brothers. Throughout the quintet, Sir Stephen quotes an Orthodox wedding hymn and traditional Russian drinking songs to orient listeners within the story; he also uses text painting techniques such as a dotted rhythm motive to represent the frenetic sledge ride and shrieking glissandos in the strings to convey the sounds of howling wolves and terrified horses.



Commissioned by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Les Noces Rouges was premiered by the composer and the Viano Quartet in November 2024 at David Geffen Hall in New York.



“A vivid, listenable, and ingeniously crafted score…

with a suggestion of macabre, dark comedy.”

— MUSICAL AMERICA

Music@Menlo is an internationally acclaimed chamber music festival and institute in the San Francisco Bay Area. Founded by David Finckel and Wu Han as a program of Menlo School, Music@Menlo features unique immersive programming, a roster of world-class artists, and a Chamber Music Institute for emerging and pre-professional musicians. Intimate performance venues and signature offerings such as AudioNotes MP3s, Café Conversations, and the Encounter lecture series offer a wide range of opportunities for aficionados and newcomers of all ages to connect with chamber music in new and innovative ways.

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“One of the finest chamber music festivals in the United States.”

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