Another Disappointing Encounter with Hewitt

2017 photograph of Angela Hewitt in Toronto (photograph by Mykola Swarnyk, from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license)

Once again Chamber Music San Francisco (CMSF) scheduled pianist Angela Hewitt for a solo recital. Those that have followed this site for some time probably know my track record with her past performances. As in the past, I continue to be more than merely satisfied with the precision of her keyboard technique. However, also in the past, she never seems to add expression to that precision.

This season’s program accounted for a broad span of approaches to keyboard music extending from the eighteenth century to the early twentieth. Each half of the program began with a composer from the Baroque period. The opening selection was Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 829 keyboard partita (the fifth in a set of six), composed in the key of G major. The second half began with five relatively short pieces by François Couperin, all taken from the “Sixiême Ordre” in his second Livre de Piéces de clavecin. In the first half of the program, Bach’s partita was coupled with Robert Schumann’s Opus 22, his second piano sonata in G minor. The program concluded with music that nodded to the preceding performance, Maurice Ravel’s suite Le tombeau de Couperin.

As in the past, I found myself impressed with Hewitt’s attention to getting every note in its proper place; but there was little awareness of music emerging from those notes. Thus, there was no sense of dance forms in the music that Bach composed for so many of his keyboard works. Where Couperin was concerned, Hewitt spent too much time leaning on the damper pedal, which particularly muddled one of his most engaging pieces, “Les Baricades Mistérieuses.”

In reviewing the scribbles in my program book, I see that “blur” showed up in my annotations for the selections by Schumann and Ravel. Neither of those composers deserved that description in performance, and Hewitt’s account of Schumann’s scherzo movement was downright incoherent. Where Le tombeau de Couperin is concerned, Hewitt’s only virtue was providing information about how each of the movements was dedicated to the composer’s friends and relatives that died during World War I.

For her encore selection Hewitt shifted from Ravel to Claude Debussy, but her account of “Clair de lune” was no more convincing than any of the preceding selections on the program.