{"id":16328,"date":"2013-12-01T08:10:35","date_gmt":"2013-12-01T13:10:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/?p=16328"},"modified":"2013-12-01T08:10:35","modified_gmt":"2013-12-01T13:10:35","slug":"daily-album-review-27-incisive-highly-articulated-beethoven-from-pianist-angela-hewitt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/2013\/12\/01\/daily-album-review-27-incisive-highly-articulated-beethoven-from-pianist-angela-hewitt\/","title":{"rendered":"Daily album review 27: Incisive, highly articulated Beethoven from pianist Angela Hewitt"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"(Rod<\/a>
(Rod Taylor photo.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

There is something abut Angela Hewitt’s analytical ferocity and pinpoint-precise playing that reveals all. As with an HD camera, every pore and nostril hair is laid bare for us to take in.<\/p>\n

If there were no music to carry all this analysis, it would be best to move on. But Hewitt’s scalpel mind and clockwork fingers are informed by a larger and quite compelling artistic panorama. It is distinctly her own, though, which is a love-it-ot-hate-it proposition.<\/p>\n

\"beethoven\"<\/a>In her latest recording, just released by Hyperion, Hewitt has assembled 72-1\/2 minutes of Beethoven piano sonatas — the fourth volume in her ongoing survey.<\/p>\n

As with everything else, there is a lot of thought behind the selection of three works, each from a different period in Beethoven’s compositional life, none counting among the more popular of his 32 sonatas, yet each a fine example of what he was doing at a given point in time.<\/p>\n

The first work, Op. 22 (No. 11), from 1800, is all Classical form, given some spiky kick by Beethoven’s abrupt changes in dynamics — something all keyboard composers were savouring with the advent of instruments capable of bigger and more sudden dynamic changes (it was called the pianoforte for a reason).<\/p>\n

Hewitt digs in, giving us a splashy opening, then turns her attention to the more delicate musical unfoldings of the next two movements before giving us a rousing finish.<\/p>\n

The second work is Op. 31, No. 3 (Sonata No. 18<\/em>), filled with that you’ll-never-guess-what-I’m-going-to-do-next quality of Beethoven’s middle period. Hewitt lays it out with utter clarity, keeping just enough narrative tension to force Beethoven’s playful patchwork to stitch together neatly.<\/p>\n

The real charmer, for me is the final selection, the 28th Sonata, Op. 101, from 1816. Hewitt gives it a wonderful, searching quality that at times seems not of this world anymore — much like Franz Schubert’s late sonatas.<\/p>\n

For me, the mental image conjured up by the overall effect of listening to Hewitt’s playing is that of a key being pressed by the eraser end of a pencil: precise, delicate, clean, hyper-articulated.<\/p>\n

The overall sound, captured at the Jesus-Christus-Kirche in Berlin last year, has just enough spaciousness to beguile. But, as with the HD cameras, the definition is so great that I noted a couple of editing splices in the recording — something that would normally totally escape me.<\/p>\n

I prefer my Beethoven a little messier, in the sense of less-obviously premeditated and more spontaneous-sounding (which is all a question of artifice artfully hidden) but there is a lot to love here, especially if you are already a Hewitt disciple.<\/p>\n

For all the details as well as audio samples, click here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

John Terauds<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There is something abut Angela Hewitt’s analytical ferocity and pinpoint-precise playing that reveals all. As with an HD camera, every pore and nostril hair is laid bare for us to take in.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":16329,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3,77,36,47,51,52],"tags":[6451,206,286,485,1589,6468,6471,3060,4232],"yst_prominent_words":[],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2013\/12\/hewitt.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9bakr-4fm","amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16328"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16328"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16328\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16336,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16328\/revisions\/16336"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16329"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16328"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16328"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16328"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=16328"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}