The sequence works well as a recital-like experience, and also as a vehicle for Hough’s comprehensive mastery of his art...The idiom of his own ‘Vida breve’ Sonata, with its cogent sweep and flawlessly written fugato sections, is intriguingly difficult to pin down – somewhere between Busoni and Albéniz, perhaps?

To call this a concept album would be to diminish its power and timeliness. It is both a meditation on the fragility of life and a Bergmanesque game of chess with Death, for which Hough has laid out his pieces and pawns in a masterstroke of programming...Two of Hough’s own arrangements, of a Korean traditional song and of Gounod/Bach, are at once transcendental and defiant: checkmate Death.

the Funeral March is grim and remorseless, an unflinching evocation of national and ceremonial grief. A hair-raising blend of mastery and imagination characterises the finale’s whirling diablerie. Similarly overwhelming is the central octave galop of Funérailles, where Liszt recalls the hoofbeats of the Polish cavalry he heard in Chopin’s A-flat Polonaise.

Hough’s concept is death, starting with magisterial accounts of Busoni’s famous transcription of Bach’s Chaconne and continuing with Chopin’s Funeral March sonata and Liszt’s Funerailles. There’s a demonically witty glint in the last’s Bagatelle sans tonalité and in Busoni’s Chamber Fantasy.