Star pianist Angela Hewitt makes stunning comeback after seven years away

Canadian pianist Angela Hewitt made a triumphant return to Sydney after seven years away.

Angela Hewitt played to a packed house for her Sydney concert.

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There are a handful of performers you sit down and listen to at a concert and you come away thinking, how can that be improved upon? Canadian pianist Angela Hewitt is one of that rare breed and her regular appearances in Australia over the past two decades or more have built her a substantial fanbase.

So the news that Chris Howlett, a Melbourne-based cellist and co-director of the Australian Digital Concert Hall, had booked her for a four-concert tour in Melbourne, Adelaide, Bendigo and Sydney – her first appearances here in seven years – was cause for celebration, reflected in the packed City Recital Hall auditorium at a time when promoters are finding it ever harder to sell seats.

Hewitt has recently completed recording a survey of WA Mozart’s piano sonatas and she chose for this concert one of only two of the 18 works written in a minor key. Sonata No. 14 in C minor, K475, was composed shortly after his mother died in 1778, and it was published alongside his Fantasia, also in C minor, and this piece made a dramatic curtain-raiser to the recital.

Both pieces gave Hewitt plenty of scope for her dramatic flair - you see the music play out in her facial expressions and gestures – as well as her superb control of light, shade and dynamic.

This was a sparkling performance of Mozart at his most operatic, pointing the way for a young Beethoven to follow.

It as an interpreter of JS Bach’s works that Hewitt, the daughter of a church organist, has become best known, and the Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue in D minor BWV 903 is a work that counts as a favourite that she has regularly turned to over her long career. This is the old master giving the keyboard a rigorous road test with great rolling arpeggios, trills and ornaments, and obviously having fun while doing so.

It made for a breathtaking close to the first half.

More Baroque wizardry followed when Hewitt opened the second set with George Friderich Handel’s Chaconne in G major, HWV 435, its contrasting permutations, now slow and graceful, now febrile and reckless, making the perfect companion to the final work of the night, Johannes Brahms’ magnificent set of 24 variations based on a theme from Handel’s first Harpsichord Suite, all ending in a mighty fugue.

DETAILS

• CONCERT Angela Hewitt in Recital

• WHERE City Recital Hall, Sydney

• WHEN October 15, 2024