SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL CONCERT REVIEW


Bach, Schumann: Angela Hewitt, piano, presented by San Francisco Performances at Herbst Hall, San Francisco. 1.12.2009 (HS)


“She can do some marvelous things, eh?” I said to a pianist friend when we met at intermission of Angela Hewitt’s recital Tuesday evening at Herbst Theater, her first appearance on a San Francisco Performances series since 2001. He screwed up his face in pain.

“Find it a bit mannered, do you?” I asked mildly.

“You think?” he responded.

I allowed as how I do like my Bach at a steadier pace. The Canadian pianist opened the program with the Partita No. 1, which should have played to her considerably strengths. She is, after all, renowned as an interpreter of Bach, and there were moments when the reasons for that reputation were apparent. She invested rhythms with a wonderful spring and created a delicate ping to the sound that served Bach beautifully. When she settled into a pace, there was no sense of chugging along dryly, as some early-music interpreters insist Bach’s music should be. Her phrases brimmed with life.

But then, for some unaccountable reason, she threw in one gratuitous ritard after another. The first time she finished a phrase with a slowing down and hesitation before preceding, it seemed arresting. The 15th time she did the same thing, it became officially annoying. This, and the occasional rushed phrase, was not rubato, when the underlying pace remains steady but some elements of a phrase get a little more duration than others, but a repeated disruption of the pulse. That is a puzzling choice for an artist to make. After all, except for the opening preludes, Bach based the individual movements of his partitas on dances. Anyone trying to dance to this music would be thrown off stride repeatedly.

She then moved on to Schumann’s quirky Davidsbündlertänze. Again, there were moments of absolute magic. The quieter, more introspective moments, such as “Einfach” and “Zart undo singend,” had a beguiling singing quality, combined with a sense of aching in the background. And “Mit guten Humor” flashed with wit. But she put so much detail into the more dramatic sections, such as “Ungedulig,” that they came off as fussy rather than free, and the final buildup through the final two movements got so wrapped up in her attention to tempo shifts and fussy dynamics that they lost their thrust.

After intermission, she seemed to be holding back from overdoing things in Schumann’s Sonata No. 2 in G minor, so much so that it lacked the whirlwind qualities that can make it so thrilling. Again, the best part was the simple, singing, second movement.

Finally, the Bach Partita No. 2 showed many of the same strengths and weaknesses heard in the first one, except that she finally quit pushing and pulling on the tempo in the Gigue finale, and simply let it bounce along without hesitations and byplay.

For an encore, she played Mary Stowe’s somewhat romantic arrangement of Bach’s “Sheep May Safely Graze” with no artifice. If only she had addressed the rest of the concert so directly.

Harvey Steiman