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Angela Hewitt
“What draws the listener to Angela Hewitt . . . has to do with
contact,” the music critic Bernard Holland wrote in a review of a
concert by the pianist for the New York Times (February 17,
2007). “Most piano performances arrive in translation: the inner
musician making a decision, then issuing a command that makes its
way through the body onto the keyboard and into the ear. The process
alters the results. Ms. Hewitt is one of those rare musicians who
seem to get something into their heads and hearts and find it at
their fingertips instantaneously. To fuel this leap must require a
fund of psychic energy beyond the average capacity. Good musicians
are good athletes, not in the muscular sense but in the staying
power of their imaginations. This pianist's resolve to imbue every
musical moment with an unrelenting sense of theater would exhaust
most of us in 10 minutes.” A child prodigy, the Canadian-born Hewitt
made her orchestral debut with the Ottawa Civic Symphony at the age
of 10, in 1968. She captured the top prize in eight international
piano competitions, the first when she was 17; the last, at the
International Bach Piano Competition, in Toronto in 1985, earned her
the opportunity to make her first recording, for Deutsche Grammophon.
She made her New York City debut in 1984, at Alice Tully Hall, and
her London, England, debut the next year, at Wigmore Hall. She has
since performed in many other prestigious concert halls, both in
solo recitals and alongside many highly regarded orchestras, among
them the Japan, Cleveland, and BBC Philharmonic Orchestras and the
Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, Bournemouth, Philadelphia, San
Francisco, and Baltimore Symphony Orchestras. She has toured
extensively worldwide, in North America, Europe, the Middle East,
Asia, and Australia; as a member of a six-member pianists'
collective called Piano Six, she has also given many recitals in
remote areas of Canada, for schoolchildren and others who had seldom
if ever heard classical music. Currently, she maintains a schedule
of about 100 concert dates each year. A recital of hers in London in
2003 inspired the music critic Paul Driver to write for the London
Sunday Times (September 21, 2003) that Hewitt “is one of the
reliably mesmerising musicians of the day. . . . She seems to me the
complete performer, gifted not only with fingers that imprint each
note with a svelte newness and a mind that is not deflected by such
precision work from calmly surmising the larger structure, but also
with the ability to convey a spiritual seriousness that nonetheless
does not exclude an utter charm.”
Hewitt's repertoire includes several hundred solo piano pieces and
works for piano and orchestra--many hundreds of pages of music that
she has memorized. They include music by composers from the Baroque
period, which extended from the last decades of the 16th century to
the middle of the 18th (among them François Couperin, Domenico
Scarlatti, Jean-Philippe Rameau, and George Frideric Handel); the
latter half of the 18th century and the 19th (among them Haydn,
Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Chopin, Brahms, Grieg,
Mendelssohn, Liszt, Mussorgsky, and Chabrier); and the 20th century
(among them de Falla, Ravel, Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff, Honegger,
Barber, Copland, and Messiaen, and six contemporary Canadian
composers who wrote works especially for her). In the
classical-music world, she is widely considered the foremost living
interpreter of the works of Bach. In a project that began in 1994
and continued for 11 years, she recorded, on 18 CDs, all of Bach's
major keyboard compositions, among them the Well-Tempered Clavier
(Books I and II), the Goldberg Variations, the Two- and Three-Part
Inventions, the Partitas, the French Suites, the English Suites, the
Toccatas, the Italian Concerto, the Keyboard Concertos, the
Brandenburg Concerto no. 5, and the Triple Concerto in A minor; a
scholar of music as well, she wrote the liner notes for all of those
CDs (as well as her other albums). “This series is one of the record
glories of our age,” a London Sunday Times (January 21, 2001)
reviewer enthused, after writing that “Hewitt's playing radiates
joy, wit and profound understanding of the composer's keyboard
style.” Hewitt has also recorded all the solo piano music of Ravel
and all of Chopin's nocturnes as well as albums devoted to music by
Couperin, Beethoven, Messiaen, Chabrier, and Granados. “I like
playing a wide variety of stuff,” she told Richard Todd for the
Ottawa Citizen (November 28, 1996), “but, to tell the truth,
when I’m playing Bach, and that’s the hardest to do well, I ask
myself, ‘Why do I ever play anything else when I could be playing
this?’”
In 2006 Hewitt was named the Artist of the Year by Gramophone
magazine. Each of her two albums of Bach's Keyboard Concertos (2005)
was named the Recording of the Month by Gramophone; others
among her recordings were named the Gramophone Editor's
Choice, including the disc containing three Beethoven sonatas
(2006), or Gramophone Critics' Choice, among them her
rendering of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I (1998). That
recording was also named the BBC Music Magazine Best Album of
the Year and won a 1999 Juno Award (equivalent to a Grammy) as best
classical album, from the Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and
Sciences. Hewitt won another Juno Award in 2002, for her album of
Bach arrangements--transcriptions of works that Bach wrote for other
instruments, orchestra, or voice. Hewitt was named an Officer of the
Order of Canada in 2000 and received the first annual BBC Radio 3
Listeners' Award/Royal Philharmonic Society Award in 2003. In a
ceremony at Buckingham Palace, in London, on March 1, 2007, Queen
Elizabeth II presented her with the Order of the British Empire.
The second of the two children and only daughter of Geoffrey and
Marion Hewitt, Angela Hewitt was born on July 26, 1958 in Ottawa,
Ontario, Canada. Her father, a native of England, gained some renown
as the organist and choirmaster at the Christ Church Cathedral in
Ottawa from 1931 to 1980; her mother was a high-school teacher of
English and music. “My mother used to tie me into my playpen and I’d
spend hours undoing the knots,” Hewitt told Geoffrey Norris for the
London Daily Telegraph (November 3, 2003), after noting that
she has “always liked to unravel complicated things.” Her parents
played a vital role in shaping her musical development. On Sundays
beginning early in her childhood, Hewitt would listen to her father
play the organ in church. He “always performed Bach with great
colour and drama, and the right sense of timing . . . ,” as she
recalled to Linda Scales for the University of Ottawa magazine
Tabaret (Fall 2005, on-line). “My father was a perfectionist and
I think he passed that onto me.” As a toddler Hewitt played a toy
piano; when she was three she began to study piano and classical
ballet. “I was always responding to music by dancing around the
room,” she told Geoffrey Norris. Her pianistic gifts were apparent
immediately. “My mother saw that I easily picked out tunes on the
piano and had a really good ear,” Hewitt told a writer for the
Toronto Star (April 11, 2002). Her parents, who were her first
music teachers, introduced her to the keyboard compositions of Bach
“right away,” as she told Norris. “Bach is the basis of all
technique . . . ,” she told Arthur Kaptainis for the Montreal
Gazette (March 11, 1998). “For fingering, for articulation, for
phrasing, for the acquisition of a beautiful singing tone.” Hewitt
was strongly influenced by the idiosyncratic recordings of the
Canadian pianist Glenn Gould (1932–82), whose prodigious technique
and many personal eccentricities were legendary. When she listened
to Gould’s radical interpretations of Bach's Inventions and other
pieces, as she recalled to Norris, she would think, “That piece
should surely go slowly. Why’s he playing it so fast?” or “That
piece is obviously a fast one. Why’s he playing it so slowly?” “I
knew from the beginning that there was something a bit strange in
his character that meant that we could listen to him but would never
imitate him,” she said. During her youth Hewitt also took violin
lessons (for 10 years), played the recorder, and sang in her
father’s choir.
Hewitt gave her first public performance at age four, at the Christ
Church Cathedral. At five she won her first piano competition, in
Rimouski, Quebec. The next year she won a scholarship to the Royal
Conservatory of Music in Toronto, where she studied for nine years.
She made her first appearance with an orchestra--the Ottawa Civic
Symphony (now the Ottawa Symphony)--in 1968. At 15 Hewitt entered
the University of Ottawa as a “special student.” Her piano teacher
there was Jean-Paul Sevilla, whom she described to Linda Scales as
“fabulous from the first lesson. I never met anyone who taught like
him. He just gave it his all; such joie de vivre!” Under Sevilla’s
tutelage Hewitt expanded her musical repertoire, studying, in
addition to compositions by Bach, pieces by the 19th–20th-century
French composers Paul Dukas, Maurice Ravel, and Olivier Messiaen.
Sevilla taught her “more than just the piano,” she said to Bob Clark
for the Calgary Herald (February 9, 2002). “During his summer
courses at Aix-en-Provence [in France] we’d have lessons every day,
go to all the concerts and then go to the beach on weekends. So he
made us enjoy life, too.” In 1975 she won a top prize in a Bach
competition held in Washington, D.C., and the Chopin Young Pianists'
Competition, held in Buffalo, New York; she took the first prize in
a Bach competition held in Leipzig, in what was then East Germany,
in 1976, and a Schumann competition, in Zwickau, also in East
Germany, in 1977. That year, at age 18, Hewitt graduated from the
University of Ottawa with a bachelor’s degree in music. The
following year she moved to Paris, France. Also in 1978 she was
victorious in the piano category in the Gian Battista Viotti
Competition, in Italy, and in the piano competition of the CBC
Talent Festival; in 1979 and 1980 she captured first prize at the
Casadesus piano competition in Cleveland, Ohio, and the Dino Ciani
Competition held at La Scala, in Milan, Italy, respectively. At
around that time, having decided to focus on solo piano performance,
she regretfully gave up her ballet training. Her ballet studies, she
told a writer for the Toronto Star (April 11, 2002), had
helped her to become disciplined. In addition, as a dancer, she
said, “you learned stage presence and it even helps with how to play
the piano, using your whole body rather than playing from the
shoulders.”
At her New York City debut, in 1984 at Alice Tully Hall, Hewitt
played Ravel's Tombeau de Couperin, Bach's Toccata in C
minor, Brahms's Piano Sonata no. 3, and, in a world premiere,
Fantasia on a Theme of Robert Schumann, by the Canadian composer
Steven Gellman. In 1985 she achieved a professional breakthrough, by
winning the first prize at the International Bach Piano Competition,
in Toronto, in a contest against 32 other pianists, whittled down
from 166 applicants. (Olivier Messiaen was among the judges, and
Hewitt played one of his pieces during the competition.) Hewitt’s
performance earned her a recording contract with the Deutsche
Grammophon label and 20 concert engagements in Canada and Europe.
Also in 1985 Hewitt moved to London and made her debut in that city,
at Wigmore Hall. Her first recording, for Deutsche Grammophon, which
went on sale in 1986, offered renditions of Bach’s Italian Concerto
in F major, Toccata in C minor, Four Duets (two-part inventions),
and the English Suite no. 6 in D minor. Though it was well received,
Deutsche Grammophon executives decided that Bach piano recordings
would never sell well, and Hewitt's album remained her only
recording until the early 1990s, when, after years of concertizing
worldwide, Hewitt devised an ambitious undertaking: to record all of
Bach’s major works written for keyboard. The existence of highly
regarded recordings of the same music made earlier by two famous
interpreters of Bach--Gould and the American pianist Rosalyn Tureck--did
not give her pause. “I thought there was room for another . . . ,”
she told Bob Clark for the Calgary Herald (February 9, 2002).
“I’m very different from both [Tureck and Gould]. I just felt I had
my own way and that people were eager to hear it.” For Hewitt, the
primary challenge that the project presented lay in the preparation
rather than the recording process itself. “Playing, for example, his
preludes and fugues, you've got four or five voices going at once,
each of which has to be as clearly defined as the other and
perfectly balanced,” she told David Prince for the Santa Fe New
Mexican (September 23, 2005). “Also, there is the musical
knowledge you need to play Bach because, of course, in his time,
nothing was written in the score. . . . You have the odd indication
of tempo but hardly at all in all of his keyboard output. You have
to know what the dances of the time were like, their
characteristics, so as to play and apply those to the music. And
often it's not written that such-and-such dance is a minuet or a
gigue or a bourrée--you have to recognize it just from the music.”
Commenting on the technical complexity of Bach’s music, she said,
“From memory, it’s the hardest music you can play. You put one
finger wrong and you’re off, and it’s very hard to improvise a Bach
fugue. It takes enormous concentration. It takes a lot of
preparation before you can even play it the way you can sort of muff
your way through a Beethoven sonata. In Bach, there’s no place to
hide.” After an extensive search for the most suitable instrument,
Hewitt and her producer, Otto Ernst Wohlert, chose a Steinway piano
on which the great 20th-century German pianist Wilhelm Kempff made
many recordings.
“Bach wrote most of his music for pedagogical purposes, and there is
a progression to be followed if you want to understand them
correctly,” Hewitt wrote in an article for the Ottawa Citizen
(September 6, 2004). She began her recording project with the
Fantasia in C Minor and Two-Part Inventions (1994). Next came Six
Partitas (1997); The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I (1998) and Book
II (1999); and 48 preludes and fugues--“the Everest of the piano
repertoire,” in Hewitt’s words. During five days in 2000, the year
that marked the 250th anniversary of Bach’s death, Hewitt recorded
his Goldberg Variations at the Henry Wood Hall, in London, a famous
rehearsal and recording studio, in what she judged to be “the best
performance I had given in 24 years,” as she wrote for the Ottawa
Citizen. Hewitt completed her Bach project in 2005. Bearing the
Hyperion label, the Bach cycle was universally hailed by
classical-music aficionados and critics. Richard Todd, writing for
the Ottawa Citizen (October 7, 2003), called it one of the
most “distinguished achievements in the history of recording.”
According to Vivien Schweitzer, writing for the New York Times
(February 14, 2007), “The greatest compliment for Ms. Hewitt came
from her father, who after listening to one of her recordings, said,
‘I didn't hear you. I only heard Bach.'”
Hewitt's recent albums include a 2002 two-disc recording of solo
piano compositions by Ravel, whose music she has described as “dance
inspired,” according to Steve Mazey in the Ottawa Citizen
(April 27, 2002); a 2005 album containing Chopin's 21 nocturnes and
four impromptus; three volumes (2003–05) of Couperin's piano pieces;
and a disc (2006) with 18 of Chabrier's 26 solo piano pieces. After
she repeatedly noticed, while giving master classes, that “students
(and their teachers) often seem to have so little idea how to study
Bach,” as Vivien Schweitzer reported, Hewitt made a DVD in which she
talked about and demonstrated her approach to Bach's keyboard music,
stressing, as Schweitzer wrote, “that you must adhere to period
conventions.” The DVD is scheduled to be released in 2007.
In addition to her other honors, Hewitt was named Artist of the Year
by the Canadian Music Council in 1986, and she received the National
Arts Centre Award from the Governor General of Canada in 2000.
Hewitt maintains homes in Ottawa, London, and near the city of
Perugia, in Umbria, Italy, in a house that overlooks Lake Trasimeno.
In July 2005 Hewitt, who is fluent in Italian, launched the
Trasimeno Music Festival, an annual, weeklong event in Italy, in
which she and guest musicians perform alone, in chamber ensembles,
or with an orchestra assembled just for the festival. “Of course, I
am international,” Hewitt told Arthur Kaptainis for the Montreal
Gazette (March 11, 1998). “Especially considering where I live
and how much I travel. But deep down, I am Canadian.”
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