Musician Angela Hewitt impresses at Piano Sundays

“Complex and horizontal” is how pianist Angela Hewitt describes Bach’s keyboard Partitas, writes Garry Fraser.

If you add three-dimensional, you get an idea of the intricacies of these works, compositions that require a special talent not many players possess. Hewitt has that talent in abundance,. Suffice to say that if you want a definitive performance of Bach’s keyboard works, look no further than this Canadian sensation.

She fully deserves billing as the queen of the baroque keyboard. I would love to hear her play these works on harpsichord, as originally written, but the Perth Concert Hall grand was a fitting enough instrument for Sunday’s stunning performance. The Bach Partitas, nos. 1 and 2, were played to clinical perfection but amongst this precision was extreme musicality and immense interpretation. The Scarlatti sonatas that followed were delightful examples of ingenuity.

To jump a couple of centuries from this genre and pitch straight into a Ravel Sonatine showed tremendous versatility. It’s part of the game to multitask but this was something special. It was equally brilliant, equally virtuosic and equally enjoyable, leaving one to savour the switch and marvel in its execution.

And if this didn’t hit the spot, surely Chabrier’s Bourree Fantasque would. It’s a work rarely heard and one might ask why. It has all the hallmarks of a fantastic virtuosic concert piece and had the performance ended there, I would have been well satisfied. However, a sublime encore of Debussy’s Clare de Lune was the icing on a very, very palatable cake.