Angela Hewitt (piano), Lakeside, Nottingham, 11 April 2024. 5✩✩✩✩✩ Review: William Ruff. Review: William Ruff.

Photo Credit: Keith Saunders

Angela Hewitt (piano), Lakeside, Nottingham, 11 April 2024.

5✩✩✩✩✩ Review: William Ruff.

“Angela Hewitt: an artist of flawless technique and probing intelligence.”

Nottingham’s music-lovers know that they have to join the ticket queue early if they want to hear Angela Hewitt play Bach at Lakeside. She has been performing regularly at the venue ever since it opened in 1994, with each concert being sold out weeks in advance.

She is one of the world’s supreme interpreters of the keyboard music of J.S. Bach. Indeed many would say that she is without peer. In Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday the brain-surgeon protagonist has to listen to Bach when operating on his patients – and his chosen artist is always Angela Hewitt. No one reading that would be surprised. Bach’s music and influence were again celebrated in Thursday’s recital: six Preludes and Fugues from Book 1 of The Well-Tempered Clavier to start and the Partita No. 6 to end – with music by other composers inspired by Bach in between.

It's unlikely that any other pianist knows Bach’s ‘48’ Preludes and Fugues more intimately than Angela Hewitt. Not only has she recorded them all twice but the second version followed a world tour in which she played them all in 58 cities in 21 countries on 6 continents. Her deep knowledge of the music, far from encouraging a sense of stale routine, only increases the freshness (and apparent spontaneity) of her performances. Everything about her approach to the music – from her overall grasp of structure to fine details such as phrasing and the contrasting colours of individual notes – reveals such an instinctive grasp of this repertoire that she produces the uncanny sensation that she has a direct line to Bach himself. Her playing of the fugues in particular suggests voices in conversation and argument, each strand of discourse given its due weight, each brought into the foreground as required to make its full impact.

Bach’s six Preludes and Fugues were followed by works by Mendelssohn, Shostakovich and Samuel Barber, all of which had been inspired by Bach’s great example. Angela’s decision to play the entirety of her recital’s first half without a break (and without audience applause) enhanced the effect, allowing the line of descent to be unobscured. And the delightfully jazzy, breathtakingly virtuosic Barber Fugue was a splendid way to bring such a densely packed first half to a conclusion.

Angela Hewitt concluded her programme with Bach’s Partita No. 6 in a performance which imbued this suite of dance movements with elegance, agility and exquisite precision. After such a display of intellectual and technical mastery it seemed almost unreasonable to expect an encore – but Angela obliged with a Mendelssohn ‘song without words’, playing with the same freshness and insight that had graced the whole recital.

Angela Hewitt (piano)