Hewitt’s magical Mozart journey begins
Rebecca Franks finds much to enjoy as the pianist commences her latest cycle
Mozart
Piano Sonatas Nos 1-7, K289-284; K309 Angela Hewitt (piano) Hyperion CDA68411/2 144:30 mins (2 discs) With her live Bach Odyssey behind her and the Beethoven piano sonatas wrapped up on disc, Angela Hewitt has embarked on another completist project: Mozart’s piano sonatas. She begins here with the first seven and, as she writes in her enjoyable and insightful booklet notes, she was delighted to discover she can fit the entire set, in chronological order, on three double CDS.
If this first volume is anything to go by, the journey will be a joy. These may be the earliest of Mozart’s sonatas – the first six were probably written while he was still a teenager in 1774/5, the seventh when he was 21 – but by then, of course, he had already written eight operas. And if they are familiar to student pianists, that’s no guarantee that they are easy to play. That said, Hewitt makes them sound effortless. Her articulation is clean, the pedalling lightly judicious, her fingers nimble and strong, the ornamentation always tasteful, while the clarity of her approach brings out the individual character of each sonata, each movement.
Fast movements are, variously, buoyant, brisk and bright, while Hewitt brings vulnerability to the Third Sonata’s Andante amoroso and a dancer’s grace to the Rondeau en polonaise of No. 6. We hear the young composer experimenting with ideas, textures and styles, and every so often giving us music that points to his maturity and feels like quintessential Mozart. The Adagio in F minor of the Second Sonata is a case in point. Here, he taps into a sublime, operatic melancholy, beauty mingling with anguish, its expression wonderfully heightened by Hewitt’s embellishments of the repeats. PERFORMANCE ★★★★★ RECORDING ★★★★★
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Hewitt’s approach brings out each movement’s individual character