Yesterday afternoon pianist Angela Hewitt returned to Herbst Theatre for her latest solo recital appearance with Chamber Music San Francisco (CMSF). Her last CMSF appearance took place almost exactly five years ago, in March of 2018. However, I have not attended one of her performances since December of 2009, early in my tenure with Examiner.com. Both then and now my most positive impressions involved the precision of her keyboard technique. However, when it came to taking on any sense of expressiveness behind that technique, I was as disappointed yesterday as I was in 2009.
To her credit, yesterday Hewitt provided a generous spoken offering to provide background for each half of the program, thus compensating for the lack of notes in the program book. The first half was devoted to two of the three major composers from the Baroque period that were born in 1685, Domenico Scarlatti and Johann Sebastian Bach. (The third was George Frideric Handel.) Scarlatti was represented by four of his keyboard sonatas (K. 1 in D minor, K. 446 in F major, K. 531 in E major, and K. 420 in C major), which made for a satisfactory sampling. The Bach selection, on the other hand, was more problematic.
Hewitt performed the BWV 811 “English” suite (the last of the set of six) in D minor. While her keyboard precision could not be faulted, her accounts showed no awareness of the different qualities associated with the different dance forms that Bach had included in this suite. All she had to offer was a bevy of notes, which did little to establish or hold the attention of the serious listener.
The second half of the program was devoted entirely to Johannes Brahms’ Opus 5 (third) piano sonata in F minor. Brahms composed his early in his career, and it is a veritable monster of technical challenges. Hewitt seemed determined to rise to each of those challenges, and one can definitely acknowledge her achievements over the course of the sonata’s five movements. However, where rhetoric was concerned, there was little more than the aggression she brought to every key stroke. The result felt more like an impressive display of athletic prowess, rather than an account of the rich diversity of expressiveness that went into Brahms’ score.
That athletic display was better suited to the composer responsible for her encore selection: Franz Liszt. Hewitt played his arrangement of “Widmung,” the first song in Robert Schumann’s Opus 25 Myrthen song cycle. She seemed more at home with Liszt’s excessive embellishments, which barely leave any room for the theme in Schumann’s vocal line. This made for an impressive encore but perhaps also some explanation for her disappointing over-the-top accounts of Bach and Brahms.
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