Bach, Couperin and Ravel, played with authority and restraint — and an audience whose devotion makes the case for an escape to the country.
Bach, Couperin and Ravel, played with authority and restraint — and an audience whose devotion makes the case for an escape to the country.
Angela Hewitt is an elegant, unshowy performer who generates a hearty sound. She plays with authority and economy — commanding, coaxing and cajoling the piano into sounding the line — through isolated movement in the fingers and forearms, with occasional gestures from the head drawing focus to the stillness in the rest of her frame. That such modest movement can summon this wide range of characters, colours and timbres makes the achievement more resonant. The Bach, Couperin and Ravel that made up her Cheltenham programme had a crisp clarity and sense of urgency that let the emotional throughline sit comfortably alongside her facility, expression and style.
Programming 200-odd years of music in one sitting showed how Hewitt’s craft has built a lasting reputation. The Schumann Piano Sonata sat muddier in the Pittville Pump Room acoustic than the Bach Partita that preceded it. Regardless, Hewitt’s commitment to opening up the piano’s dynamic range, adapting to the needs of the work and the demands of the acoustic. Fortissimos thundered — her right forefinger is a force to be reckoned with — so much so that at times the piano seemed close to disintegrating. That muddiness in the Schumann was tamed best in the deadened second movement, where Hewitt’s skill in building narrative from the most granular elements showed clearly: a single note in a melodic phrase taking on a different colour, a kind of musical ambivalence created in a very short space of time.
Clarity returned, necessarily, for a selection from Couperin’s Sixième Ordre. Purists might insist this only works on a harpsichord, but rendered on a modern piano, music written 300 years ago took on a distinctly present-day feel. This wasn’t delicate, demure playing — there was guts in the louds and a robust kind of flirtation in the quiets. Ornamentation that could easily have submerged the throughline instead drew focus to the emotional narrative implied by the harmonic progression, and to the hesitations the ornamentation introduced. The closing three movements of the selection were either timed perfectly with the world around or found Hewitt relaxing further into the sound — it’s hard to say which. The lilting, melancholic pull of the perpetual motion in Les Barricades Mystérieuses landed as the sun finally set and the evening breeze got its chance to do its work. Les Bergeries let the melancholy dissipate before a brighter mood in La Moucheron closed the set.
In the first of Ravel’s six-movement tribute Le Tombeau de Couperin, the softer timbres were maintained amid a sprightly, industrious Prelude, fortissimo splashing luminescent across only a few beats. A similar quality marked the brisk Forlane, where the distracted whimsy of Ravel’s perpetuated harmonic pivots was enhanced by instinctive rubatos, like a lightly coiled spring. The fourth-movement Minuet stretched those rubatos further, giving its middle section a balletic quality. Razor-sharp energy and precision opened the concluding Toccata, notes ricocheting around Pittville Pump Room while the articulation stayed distinct throughout.
I’d been asked earlier in the day why I’d picked Angela Hewitt — my concert selection this year has been tortured by multiple requests and scattered consultancy sessions. That was what I’d thought was the reason before, yet somewhere in the third-movement Forlane, a more pertinent thought struck me: picking the well-known performer is normally the no-no — avoidance because you assume there’s nothing left to discover, nothing you haven’t already been told. Then sometimes, as now, you pick the well-known precisely because you’ve avoided her for so long, and you’re rewarded twice over — once by the performer, once by the audience she draws. You want to see who the audience is that’s chosen her. You want to see her advocates — the people who turned out in their finest linens on a fiercely hot evening to hear her play. The people who readily applaud to accompany the performer as they walk through the auditorium back to the safety of their dressing room. There’s something more rewarding, too, in travelling out of a city to hear an acclaimed musician in a venue never built for music but perfect for it nonetheless. Proper audience commitment. Proper live performance. An audience making the case for an escape to the country.
