Angela Hewitt - Liszt: Piano Sonata & other works (2015) [Official Digital Download 24/44.1]

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Angela Hewitt - Liszt: Piano Sonata & other works (2015) [Official Digital Download 24/44.1]

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The British-Canadian pianist Angela Hewitt has a refreshing attitude to Liszt. On first hearing, the monumental Piano Sonata in B minor as a teenager she thought what an awful piece , a mere vehicle for piano bashing. Why would anyone play it? Then a better pianist her own teacher, Jean-Paul Sévilla showed her the work's miracles. At once she set about learning it herself. With Liszt, out of the wild forest of notes, the pianist must find line, delicacy, lyricism, sinew and nobility. Many players have collapsed under the weight of fiendish technical challenges so that the music sounds relentless, even grotesque. Liszt found big ideas irresistible. That other marathon, the Dante Sonata, compresses The Divine Comedy into a single movement, from the grumbling horrors of Hell to the benediction of Paradise. The harmonies, full of tritones, are wild and remote. Virtuosity is only the start. Here, in the B minor sonata and in the three youthful Petrarch Sonnets, Hewitt is magisterial. For many years Bach has been her calling card. Her Liszt is, if anything, yet more compelling. Observer, 01/02/15 /// Let's get the awkward bit out of the way first. It's the piano. Either you love Fazioli pianos or… you don't. Angela Hewitt does, and has long been a strong and persuasive advocate for the brand. At the risk of upsetting everyone (with the possible exception of Steinway) I have to register a problem. Sometimes this piano sounds utterly glorious: notably in the quietest, most ethereal moments the Petrarch Sonnet 123, for instance, or the tenderest sections of the B minor Sonata. But at other times often at higher octane moments it can come over as a tad woody, or clangy, or thuddy. It's frustrating, mainly because Hewitt's interpretations are fascinating and very individual. She flies the flag for grand-scale, Romantic Liszt, for instance never stinting on the grandeur of the heavenly visions in the Dante Sonata, and her contrapuntal awareness pays ample dividends throughout, with an ideal control over voicing and structure. Occasionally one might long for her to let rip even more; the fugue of the B minor Sonata can sound driven rather than mercurial or truly atmospheric, and in some sections of high drama and intense virtuosity she seems to hold back just when you might like her to risk all. It's nevertheless a recording to cherish; in these interpretations you can hear something new every time. And that Petrarch Sonnet 123 really is celestial. –Sinfini Music , 3/3/15

Disarmingly, Angela Hewitt mentions at the start of her booklet notes to this CD that, as a teenager, she heard Liszt's B minor Sonata and came away thinking what an awful piece it was, and wondering why anyone would want to play it. It just seemed a vehicle for banging the piano, and meandered on without any sense of purpose . We ve probably all endured off-putting performances like that, and my recent experience of hearing the sonata in a transcription for violin did nothing to further its cause. But Hewitt then goes on to describe her Damascene conversion when she heard the sonata played by a pianist who, by inference from what she says, appreciated its range of utterance, its spectrum of colour and its structural niceties as well as its pyrotechnics. Her own performance here in this all-Liszt recital is one of similar understanding and panache. She recognises that the sonata is a work of emotional extremes, but of extremes that are close-knit and have a clear expressive focus. For all the dazzling fireworks that Liszt ignites there are passages where the music turns in on itself, musing, rhapsodising, at times almost fading into the ether. This is where Hewitt's interpretation scores over those that veer from one dramatic incident to another without paying due attention to the shaping of the quieter moments of bliss and repose. The musical contours here, whether the equivalent of softly rolling hills or of daunting Alpine peaks, are seamlessly drawn together in a continuous, flowing musical landscape a landscape with its towering landmarks, to be sure, and niftily articulated in the central fugue but altogether conceived with a secure grasp of the music's organic nature. The Dante Sonata or, strictly speaking, fantasia quasi sonata is the other big work here, and, like the B minor, is impressively laid out by Hewitt in a broad, sweeping romantic arc but with a rapt sensibility in those episodes where Liszt seems to be reflecting not just on the forbidding furore of the Inferno but on those human failings summed up by Dante's line There is no greater sorrow than to recall happiness in times of misery. The blend of passion and lyricism in the three Petrarch Sonnets (the original poetic versions of which are helpfully printed in the booklet) adds a further dimension to a well-considered and stimulating disc **** –Sunday Telegraph, 1/3/15

This is possibly the very finest of Angela Hewitt's many recordings. EDITORS CHOICE . –Gramophone, Mar'15

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Angela Hewitt - Liszt: Piano Sonata & other works (2015) [Official Digital Download 24/44.1]

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