Angela Hewitt - Bach: The Art of Fugue (2014) [Official Digital Download 24/44.1]

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Angela Hewitt - Bach: The Art of Fugue (2014) [Official Digital Download 24/44.1]

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Over the years that Angela Hewitt has recorded Bach for Hyperion records, it has gradually become clear that there has been an elephant in the room. Its unspoken name was The Art of Fugue, the monument of counterpoint left unfinished at Bach's death. Hewitt wasn' t studying or playing it. Apart from being appallingly difficult, its music, she says, seemed remote, even boring. Finally, with no other Bach monument left to scale, this most elegant British-Canadian pianist grabbed her elephant by the trunk. She scheduled a performance, in two instalments, at the Royal Festival Hall in 2012-13. She studied hard, thought hard. And with the score seamlessly unrolling on her iPad she outpoured playing of unusual distinction, even for her. Recorded last summer under studio conditions in Berlin, this album captures that interpretation on her trusty Fazioli in friendly and pellucid sound. I won't mince words. This Art of Fugue is marvellous. The variety and beauty of tone alone make compelling listening, bringing contrasts, clarity and warmth to Bach's intellectual marvels. The fugal subjects pile up; they are inverted, augmented and turned inside out permutations neatly documented in the pianist's typically detailed booklet notes. Yet her fingers never make the results dry triumphs of engineering. Each piece casts a specific mood, sombre, flighty or relaxed. Hewitt maintains, too, an innate sense of the pace required for letting the counterpoint's individual voices breathe. Dotted rhythms and decorative flourishes are polished and placed with infinite care, especially noticeable in Contrapunctus 6, labelled in stylo Francese . Here and elsewhere, in his own recording from 2008, Pierre-Laurent Aimard French himself appears very tightly corseted. Throughout, Hewitt s interpretative decisions are almost all helpful and wise. The one exception for me is her addition of a chorale prelude following the last unfinished fugue, which performers usually leave dangling so poignantly in mid-air. I find the chorale an intrusion, but there can't be any doubt, surely, about the expressive benefits of performing Bach's epic on a modern concert grand other options are possible or the radiant majesty and humanity of her playing. The Art of Fugue is an elephant no more. ***** –The Times, 1/10/14

Hewitt's expressive and dynamic range is both expanded and strategically deployed, with lovely ornaments and discreet octave reinforcements. –Gramophone, October '14

Hewitt spins a lyrical cantabile throughout, every line eloquently voiced and articulated. Performance ***** Recording ***** –BBC Music Magazine, Dec'14

It's taken Angela Hewitt a long time to get round to recording Bach's supreme keyboard masterpiece, but the result is well worth the wait. And her liner-commentaries are, as usual, richly illuminating, both about the nature of the music and how to approach it. Don't play exactly what is written in the score, she advises of the dense fugal writing of Contrapunctus 6, before explaining her own little tricks with timing; listeners should look at the page, she suggests, re the exceptionally complex Contrapunctus 13, and the point of the music will immediately become clear. But the journey she presents through this wonderful labyrinth can stand perfectly well without textual support. She varies her touch and tempo like a master-chef, to allow the character of each fugue to emerge as vividly as possible, and her articulation has at all times an exemplary clarity. There are stretches of controlled brilliance and of wild exhilaration, and moments of chaste repose: as she points out, beauty can even be found in severity. She stops the unfinished Contrapunctus 14 in mid-air, then rounds things off with the Deathbed Chorale . She finds this an unbearably poignant moment . I would have found silence even more so but this debate w –Sinfini Music, 21/11/14

Hewitt is fluent and homogenous, her effective expressive and dynamic contrasts made subtly within an overarching, unifying concept, solemn but not overbearing. –IRR, Dec'14