Tempted away from her beloved Fazioli, Angela Hewitt launched this year’s Malvern Festival on a magnificent Yamaha piano, confirming that company’s important association with the event.
The combination of instrument and Hewitt’s own probing approach secured delightfully crisp, well-turned readings of music from the two “greats” of French baroque keyboard music, Couperin and Rameau. Die-hard anti-piano hair-shirted purists would be choking on their muesli, and serve them right -- these were readings which convinced as totally appropriate, and which the composers themselves would certainly have approved.
In fact the Couperin pieces would work equally well on a chuffy little single-manual chamber organ, but the wit and sentiment with which Hewitt coloured them on her piano secured accounts which will live long in the memory. And the majority of this disappointingly small audience, thronging the left-hand side of the auditorium in order to “see her hands” missed the trick; a pianist’s facial expressions are the clue, and I saw so much pleasure and delight in her own playing of these miniatures on Hewitt’s features.
All miniatures, except for the concluding ‘Passacaille’, a tremendous artefact, almost improvisatory under Hewitt’s hands, and with chords and textures as rolling as any harpsichord could produce.
And the altogether more earnest A minor Suite by Rameau ended in much the same way, with its concluding ‘Gavotte et 6 Doubles’ similarly dressing the bare bones of a simple theme. Hewitt delivered the whole Suite with style, relish, and a legitimately sensuous shaping of phrasing; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the arch-sentimentalist, would have approved.
Sandwiched between these baroque giants was the uniquely un-pigeonholeable Faure, his ‘Theme and Variations in C-sharp Minor’ picking up nicely the structural idea behind the Couperin ‘Passacaille’, picking up, too, the template of Schumann’s magnificent ‘Etudes Symphoniques’ as well as works by Cesar Franck; but all the while Faure’s sinuous harmonic language and confiding of melody made the work entirely his own.
And three of his Nocturnes cast their own intimate spell, Hewitt affirming throughout what an empathetic interpreter of French music from all periods she is.
