J.S. Bach: The Keyboard Concertos, Angela Hewitt, piano

Prior to recording Bach’s Keyboard Concertos, Angela Hewitt performed them extensively with a variety of orchestras, finally choosing the 17-strong Australian Chamber Orchestra for the sessions. These marvellous players greatly contribute to the success of the project. Bach’s Keyboard Concertos are not straightforward to play effectively using modern instruments; the combination of a velvety concert grand and vibrato-laden string playing tends to blunt Bach’s sharply-etched lines. Hewitt is her usual dancing, articulate self, and the Australians’ crisply phrased playing, with minimal vibrato, is a pleasure to hear. Their playing is comparable with our own Scottish Ensemble in its verve, attack and infectious enthusiasm.

Comparisons with Murray Perahia’s Academy of St Martin’s recordings leave me with a strong preference for the Hewitt/ACO versions. Perahia’s playing is commanding, and demands to be heard, but the Academy plays in exactly the same way that it did thirty years ago, and beside the Australians it sounds disappointingly flabby.

About the performers

Angela Hewitt is a Canadian pianist whose recording career has been built substantially around Bach, including a widely admired complete cycle of the keyboard works for Hyperion recorded over more than a decade, this concerto set sits within that larger project rather than as a standalone recording. The Australian Chamber Orchestra, led here by violinist and artistic director Richard Tognetti, has built its own international reputation on exactly this kind of high-energy, minimal-vibrato string playing across repertoire from the Baroque through to newly commissioned work, making it a natural match for Hewitt’s own historically-informed approach to a modern piano.

Hewitt employs a harpsichord continuo, which adds “front” to the ritornellos, and as Angela Hewitt remarks in her liner notes, purely continuo passages often sound “wrong” played on the piano. (Her notes are typically stylish and informative, she’s especially good on the complex relationship between various movements of the concertos and the cantatas). Hewitt’s approach to ornamentation, by turns expressive and playful, sounds natural and fun.

In addition to the standard keyboard concertos, Hewitt also includes the Fifth Brandenburg Concerto, and the Triple Concerto, where she is joined by the SCO’s Principal Flute, Alison Mitchell, and Richard Tognetti, the ACO’s inspirational leader. If you fancy the Bach concertos played on the piano, look no further!