We went to hear Angela Hewitt make one of her fairly frequent visits to Bath to give a recital in the Mozartfest. Last time I went she moved some distance from her usual stomping ground of Bach; this time she was well and truly immersed in it, with the second half of the recital being no.s 1-10 from The Art of Fugue.
I went to a pre-recital ‘conversation’ with Prof. Jonathan Cross, in which the choice of programme was explained and illustrated. In fact the conversation framework was abandoned after a while, and Angela Hewitt played us extracts from the fugues and explained what was going on in each one. She also explained her choice of instrument, a Fazioli which can produce a wide range of tone for a skilled player.
The first half contained some arrangements of Bach by Wilhelm Kempff, followed by Beethoven’s Op. 101 sonata (which I last heard, in the same place, in an arrangement for string sextet). These were all ably performed although in some sense they were antipasti.
We both thought that we couldn’t easily take in that much fugal complexity all in one go, because this is a demanding work to listen to as well. I can’t say that my concentration held up perfectly, and I realised that The Art of Fugue is much revered but is far from familiar repertoire.
What difference did the Fazioli make? I’m not sure that this is the best repertoire to show it to its best advantage. In particular, I thought that runs sounded less crisp than they would have done on a standard-issue Steinway. This is not so much of a drawback given that Angela Hewitt’s interpretative style tends, by modern standards, to the romantic. She wound down by playing some Gluck as an encore.