Hyperion’s publicity
for this set - I will be discussing
the second volume shortly - describes
it as "self-recommending".
My immediate reaction was of a certain
annoyance; I’ll decide whether
it’s to be recommended or not. For once,
however, the hype is true and indeed
it would be impossible not to recommend
performances so innately in tune with
the spirit of the music. For our times,
Angela Hewitt’s combination of a lively
and never heavy touch, unassertive virtuosity,
natural phrasing and wistfully expressive
slow movements, corresponds to what
many people hope to find in Bach. It
is playing memorable for its poise,
for its sense and its sensibility.
And yet, as Lewis Carroll
pointed out so long ago, this is a slow
sort of world in which it takes all
the running you can do to stay in the
same place. Has Angela Hewitt actually
found something new or is she recapturing
the sensible, musical interpretations
of the best Bach pianists of the 1930s?
In the intervening years we have witnessed
the sublimation of the bizarre - Glenn
Gould, wonderful at times but too often
too wilful to be taken without a pinch
of salt - and the sublimation of the
dogmatic (Rosalyn Tureck). And then
there’s all the paraphernalia of the
authentic movement .... So here we are,
back where we started.
Or are we? Let us compare
the 5th Brandenburg with
the famous old recording by the Adolf
Busch Chamber Players and Rudolf Serkin
at the piano, that recording was made
in 1935 and currently available on an
Andante compilation 69948 71986 2 3
[reviewed
by me]. The tempo for the first
movement is a shade slower chez Busch
but it still manages to be buoyant,
while Serkin’s pianism is quite extraordinarily
luminous, every note a point of light,
perfectly clear even though the recording
does not attempt to give the piano any
greater prominence than the harpsichord
would have. His cadenza is a triumph
of intellectual and emotional control.
Good as Hewitt is, it would be idle
to pretend that she has recaptured quite
this magic.
On the other hand,
the rest of the Busch performance contains
features which date it and will surely
never be revived. In the slow movement,
Serkin doubles the bass line at the
octave and it says much for his control
that it doesn’t sound even heavier than
it does. Busch’s portamenti and the
flautist Marcel Moyse’s desire to dominate
are high prices to pay for a reading
which nonetheless plumbs the religious
depths of Bach’s inspiration whereas
Hewitt’s faster tempo remains charmingly
on the surface. In the finale the Busch
group’s insistence on reading the dotted
rhythms literally in defiance of baroque
practice - and even in the 1930s there
were musicians such as the conductor
Mögens Wöldike who knew about
these things - makes for stilted results
and Hewitt is obviously preferable here.
Another historical
performance that came my way recently,
by Carlo Zecchi and Italian Radio forces
under Fernando Previtali (1938: available
on a double CD tribute to Zecchi by
Warner Fonit 5050466-3306-2-8 and reviewed
by me) shows that a pianist with fine
ideas was more likely to come to grief
with his collaborators than he would
today. This time the slower first movement
seems four-square from the orchestra
and only gradually takes wing as Zecchi’s
own contribution becomes more prominent,
culminating in a sizzling cadenza that
uses less pedal than either of the other
two. Throughout, the nervous intensity
of Gioconda De Vito’s violin playing
becomes tiresome. However, Zecchi and
his team know about the dotted rhythms
in the last movement, taken very swiftly,
and this is a signal success.
So it would seem that
Hewitt has recaptured some of the qualities
of the older Bach players while avoiding
their more dated features. However,
I venture to suggest that luminous,
sensible and sheerly musical Bach playing
has always been available, even while
the Goulds and the Turecks and the authenticists
were calling the tune. I seem to remember
some live performances of the kind by
Moura Lympany. I think that Maurice
Cole’s Saga recordings of the "48"
might bear re-examination and I suspect
that the forthcoming "48"
from Joyce Hatto will demonstrate in
some ways the continuity between the
older pianists and a younger artist
such as Angela Hewitt.
And for my last comparison
I went to an off-the-air tape of the
D minor concerto in which the young
Maria Tipo was collaborating in Rome
in 1962 with an elder statesman of the
podium, the unforgettable and glorious
Vittorio Gui. Here we find the same
sort of lively touch and natural musicality
we hear today from Hewitt; stimulated
maybe by the presence of an audience,
she and Gui present, in place of Hewitt’s
poise, a more urgent sense of communication.
The performance really takes wing at
times. Still, the lesson remains that
Tipo – a pianist not often heard on
record but usually appreciated when
she has been – could have recorded Bach
on a large scale in the 1960s and 1970s
with results not far different from
Angela Hewitt. But perhaps people were
not ready to listen to that sort of
Bach in those days. Angela Hewitt does
seem to have found a particularly responsive
public among present-day listeners;
clearly she is the right person at the
right moment.
She also has the right
collaboration from the orchestra and
the engineers and writes her own very
lucid notes, so this deserves to be
another Hyperion hit.
Christopher Howell
Volume
2
Angela Hewitt (piano), Richard Tognetti
(violin)*, Alison Mitchell (flute)* 
