Pianist Stephen Hough has won Limelight’s International Artist of the Year 2016.

The public have spoken… We asked you, our readers, to vote online for a pair of Limelight 2016 Artists of the Year. Combined with our critics’ votes, this is who you chose…

“I’m absolutely thrilled and delighted to be chosen as artist of the year – It was a lovely surprise. I always feel very, very close to Australia in so many ways and I enjoy visiting and playing there as much as anywhere in the world, so this makes me particularly happy.” – Stephen Hough

In his lovely remembrance of the great pianist and polymath Charles Rosen, published in The New Yorker only a few days after the latter’s death in December 2012, Jeremy Denk writes, “Should a musician have a brain? I mean, a brain over and above what’s necessary to move the fingers, eat, sleep, make charming chit-chat at gala dinners with sponsors, etc. We say ‘thinking musician’ as if it were a freakish breed, like a peacock that talks, distracting you from its glorious feathers.”

And yet Stephen...