After a hiatus of some seven years, acclaimed Canadian pianist, and renowned Bach exponent, Angela Hewitt returned to the Melbourne Recital Centre to present a virtuosic program of Mozart, Bach, Handel and Brahms. The audience was almost a capacity one – which augurs well for concert organisers Chris Howlett and Elle Fernon in what appears to be their inaugural international concert-management outing. It was Hewitt’s preferred model Fazioli that graced the Elisabeth Murdoch Hall stage, slightly askew from the traditional perpendicular angle, allowing for more of the audience to follow Hewitt’s balletic hands.
The recital opened with the pairing of Mozart’s Fantasia in C minor K 475 and his earlier-composed Sonata in C minor K 457. The Fantasia is Mozart’s most daring and experimental keyboard work and the one that perhaps best reveals his renowned skill as an improviser. Mozart is always at his most dramatic in his minor key works, and Hewitt infused the Fantasia with appropriately alternating gravitas and elan. Acrobatic physical gesturing suited the operatic theatricality of the Fantasia, with its constant shifts between boldly chromatic pathos and more suavely lyrical, diatonic interludes. Hewitt continued to highlight dramatic contrast in the opening movement of the Sonata, exploring abrupt shifts from piano to forte, and robustly pointed accents. Nevertheless, Hewitt captured well the beguiling cantabile of the movement’s second subject, providing some relief from the driven energy of the opening thematic material. Hewitt crafted the unaffected lyricism of the central Adagio movement with a sense of effortless ease, before unleashing with the infectious exuberance of the finale.
As with the Mozart, Bach’s Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue is one of the composer’s most daring essays in keyboard writing, its bold new approach to harmony revealing itself within the title. Hewitt revelled in the opening rhetoric of the Fantasia, exploring its free-reining improvisatory contours with both crystalline articulation and a natural, yet rhythmic pliability, culminating finally in the grandly innovative harmonic twists and turns of the coda. The opening of the fugue crept in surreptitiously, paving the way for the unfolding of the expansive contrapuntal argument. Contrapuntal lines emerged with impeccable clarity and indeed with a sense of musical inevitability that laid bare Bach the master contrapuntist, and musical architect sans pair. This was indeed compelling playing from Hewitt and the audience left her in no doubt that they found this to be a masterfully engrossing reading.
The Chaconne in G major, HWV 435 is one of Handel’s most performed keyboard works, but unlike the other works on the program, which are incontestable masterpieces, the Chaconne can seem somewhat formulaic by comparison. Nevertheless, Hewitt’s deftly clean articulation, supremely neat ornamentation and elegance of line made her as persuasive an advocate for this work as Handel could wish for. The central minor key Adagio variations were perhaps the most affective in this reading.
A neat segue then into the main course for the evening, Johannes Brahms’ Variations and Fugue on a theme of Handel, a work dedicated by the 28-year-old Brahms to Clara Schumann, Clara being not only composer Robert’s widow, but also one of the nineteenth century’s most formidable pianists, and no mean composer of variations herself. Here, unlike in Handel’s Chaconne, Brahms delivers a masterclass in the art of variation, and this set of variations from 1861 constitutes the apogee in Brahms’ exploration of the variation genre. The theme, borrowed from the Air from Handel’s First Harpsichord Suite (1733), undergoes transformations in tempo, rhythm, time signature, mode, texture, articulation, chromatic decoration, ornamentation, canon and more besides, finally culminating in a four-part fugue, featuring double thirds, double sixths, cascading double octaves and all manner of compositional fugal devices. It is easy for a canvas as vast as this to sound fragmented in lesser hands, but Hewitt, with an iron-fisted control of pulse, line and texture, and an unsurprisingly commanding technique, brought out the work’s organic monumentality with compelling steadfastness. All-too easily fugues can sound like academic exercises, replete with intellectual rigour, yet somehow bereft of any palpable emotion. Yet here, in this grand apotheosis of fugue, in Hewitt’s (and Brahms’) hands, we heard a rhythmically alert exemplar of joyous musical narrative, muscular, sure-footed, and majestic, bringing both the final work, and the recital, to a rapturously received conclusion.
Photo supplied.
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Glenn Riddle reviewed “Angela Hewitt in Recital”, presented by Chris Howlett and Elle Fernon at the Melbourne Recital Centre, Elisabeth Murdoch Hall on October 12, 2024.
