Angela Hewitt

“Angela Hewitt’s eloquent exposition of The Art of Fugue, the result of a lifetime’s immersion in Bach’s music, could hardly be bettered.” (Richard Fairman, Financial Times, May 2013)

“As always with Hewitt’s playing, there was character and thought, as well as clean execution and excellent balance in every bar [of Beethoven’s Piano Concertos Nos. 2 and 4].” (Martin Kettle, The Guardian, January 2013)

"Angela Hewitt performed on a Fazioli and served the pianistic ornithology [in Messiaen’s Reveil des oiseaux] with magically forceful imagination. Her playing possesses heavenly clarity and conciseness. Wonderful!” (Die Welt, November 2012)

“Messiaen’s wonderful ‘bird music’ [Reveil des oiseaux] has a difficult piano solo part, which Angela Hewitt tackled precisely, with subtlety and a refined sound.” (Hamburger Abendblatt, November 2012)

“Hewitt’s great achievement was to reveal [Bach’s Art of Fugue] in all its infinite intricacy: the clarity of her playing allowed different voices to emerge as dialogues in a compelling narrative. This was no dry intellectual exercise. The precision of Contrapunctus VI, with its sharply dotted rhythms in the French style, had an austere nobility, while the shaping of the virtuosic Contrapunctus IX from its almost airy opening through the growing web of complexity to its ultimate resolution, was masterly." (The Guardian, October 2012)

“Hewitt’s spectrum of touch, her fluency and sense of colour are deployed with equal enchantment in the first of the two [Debussy] arabesques, her lightness, rhythmic precision and varieties of tonal weight making the second arabesque into a glistening, fanciful filigree.” (The Telegraph, October 2012)

“Hewitt’s extraordinary attention to detail, her beautifully executed ornaments, her judicious use of pedal and her faultless control were the key factors that allowed the listener to make countless discoveries in this familiar composition. Even when her playing was quiet and subtle, she could infuse boundless energy and joy into her sound.” (Eugene Register-Guard, July 2012)

“Hewitt’s musicianship is, and has for some time been, very much her own...Bach’s French Suites were artfully paced and phrased, delicate but unmannered. What was most rewarding was a sense that Bach played on the piano could not only be clear but also sound unapologetically beautiful. The Sarabandes of each suite were transfixing.” (Boston Globe, December 2011)

 “Angela Hewitt and her orchestral colleagues make the K. 238 and 246 sound wonderful, full of the strut of a young man of incomparable genius. There's scarcely a phrase in these performances that doesn't offer unique insights, and yet the music is never stretched out of shape to provide them...This is one of Hewitt's greatest recorded achievements and in the top echelons of Mozart concerto recordings.” (The Ottawa Citizen, October 2011)

“Anyone lucky enough to have been at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in April to hear Angela Hewitt direct Mozart's Piano Concerto No 9 K271 from the keyboard will be pleased with her new ambition to record all 27 concertos for Hyperion. Judging from this first example, it's going to be a journey as revelatory as her exploration of all the major keyboard works of Bach... It's going to be a thrilling ride.” (The Guardian, September 2011)

“In what was to me the highlight of the festival, two great artists, French violinist Renaud Capucon and Canadian pianist Angela Hewitt, played concertos by Bach and Mozart. When the slow, magical strains of the Largo from Bach's Piano Concerto No. 5 floated through the church into our hearts, I had the feeling that the great meister himself was present there with us, nodding approvingly.” (Haaretz, July 2011)

“[Angela Hewitt] is such a great communicator that her renowned sense of line found its way through to the players immediately, making the first and second movements of Bach's keyboard concerto No. 5 (BWV 1056) sound like long, delicious single phrases... That sense of line appeared again in Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 9 in E flat major, played with the utmost delicacy and finesse, with her poised and intelligent direction from the keyboard wrapping the whole thing in an elegant sheen.” (The Observer, April 2011)