When Stephen Hough walks onstage at Kilbourn Hall Tuesday night, audience members will fix their eyes on one of the most amazing pianists on the planet. In September, his recording of the Saint-Saens piano concertos was named the most popular classical CD of the last 30 years. In 2001, he was the first classical musician ever to win a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant of half a million dollars to support his art. In descriptions of his 40-plus recordings, music critics simply run out of superlatives. He's "dazzling," "impeccable," and even "Olympian."

Some in the audience may note Hough's patrician features and penetrating, wide-set eyes. Those close to the Kilbourn stage might even measure the size of his hands and the shape of his fingers, which one writer described as being "each about the thickness of a baby's arm."

But they won't be able to peer into the 47 year-old British-born pianist's original mind. Hough has produced thoughtful essays about spirituality and sexuality, award-winning poetry, and, sometimes, incendiary notions about making music.

"Mistakes are fantastic," he says from his cell from Chicago's O'Hare airport, en route to Atlanta. "Nobody should be afraid of making mistakes. All the great pianists play fistfuls of wrong notes."

Hough's opinions about music include the conviction that competitions stifle creativity in young players, and that classical music written from World War II until the 1980's sprang from a fear of emotion.

"It's amazing that after all these years, music is still connected to the two things that humans have done from the beginning of recorded history, and that's to sing and to dance," he says. "Music without rhythm and melody is music that has become anti-human."

Before our interview, Hough had spent the morning in a nondescript hotel room working on a series of little pieces for the piano. He may play one of those, a tribute to Manuel de Falla, as an encore during Tuesday's night's performance.

The locus of his program in Kilbourn Hall is Paris, that center of cosmopolitan sophistication and artistic home to some of the 19th century's most influential composers. Hough will perform Chopin's formidable Sonata in B minor, an intense Toccata by Bach, and Aaron Copland's Piano Variations, a piece Hough calls "unashamedly dissonant." Copland studied in Paris.

"I imagine glass buildings and steel and the kind of New York skyline of the 1920's and 30's that existed around the time the piece was written," he says. "It's strident and bracing."

But don't get the wrong idea. Most of the music Stephen Hough will play in Rochester blooms with romantic yearning, gentle rapture, and sensuality. Gabriel Faure's Nocturne No. 6 springs surprises in almost every single bar, singing a long musical paragraph. Frederic Chopin's Sonata in B minor reflects the French aesthetic in which emotion is slightly hidden beneath the surface. It doesn't wallow. Restraint makes feeling even more powerful.

Playing Cesar Franck's Prelude, Chorale, and Fugue will give Hough the chance to delve deep into the 19th century worldview. Franck spent most his life as a church organist, and this work is a darkness-to-light scenario.

"I find it a very moving piece," Hough says, "because there's a point just before the fugue where literally, the tunes are fighting each other and the good theme triumphs."

In Franck's time, he points out, people really believed in hell.

"This is a challenge for [pianists] in the modern age, for us to get into the mindset of the composers we're playing," he says.

It helps that Hough himself is attuned to spiritual matters. He joined the Roman Catholic Church when he was a teenager. At one point, the pianist even considered becoming a Catholic priest. But music proved to be more magnetic. Plus, there was the fact that he's gay. Hough recently signed a contract to write a new book about homosexuality in the church.

Consciousness of spirituality seeps into everything he does, he says, from performing the Franck to eating a slice of pizza to writing original masses that premiered last year in Westminster Abbey and Westminster Cathedral. In 2007 the pianist published a devotional titled "The Bible as Prayer," sparked by his impressions flipping through Gideon Bibles in hotel rooms. His mindfulness of the impact of music also fueled an essay published in the journal MUSO, in which he compared our spirits to neglected old people who long for company and stimulation.

"Our bodies, our souls - all the places where music is meant to stimulate - are crying out to be touched," he says.

To do his part, the pianist will appear in solo recitals and in concerts with major orchestras well into 2010. He's also planning to record all of the piano music of Tchaikovsky, another deeply introspective figure.

Hough says he appreciates music's ability to express what can't be put into words. "There are parts of all of our lives where there are emotions that are impossible to categorize," he says. "I'm attracted to music which expresses the unclassifiable."

It keeps his mind working.

Stephen Hough

Kilbourn Hall, 26 Gibbs St.

Tuesday, December 2

8 p.m. | $7-$20 | 454-2100, esm.rochester.edu.

Brenda Tremblay is a radio producer for WXXI. She blogs about music at interactive.wxxi.org/Brenda.