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Angela Hewitt, Wigmore Hall, review: Hewitt and Bach provide the kind of shared moment we’ve all been waiting for

Angela Hewitt at the Wigmore Hall
Angela Hewitt at the Wigmore Hall

Seven years after she began, Angela Hewitt on Monday night completed her majestic traversal of all Bach’s music for harpsichord at the Wigmore Hall. She could have exited with a crowd-pleaser like the Italian Concerto, but instead she did the brave thing, climbing the lofty, lonely peak that is Bach’s Art of Fugue.

This late, otherworldly work is a compendium of different ways to make a fugue, that most “intellectual” kind of classical music. You take a pithy, shapely melody – the Art of Fugue’s main melody feels like it’s carved from granite – and combine it with itself many times over. To make things harder, you turn the melody upside down, slow it down, speed it up. To make it harder still, you combine it with another melody, and another, and another, and keep them all in play.

Bach does all these things, progressing across 14 fugues and four canons with imperturbable orderliness from the simplest to the most toweringly complex. It sounds like a recipe for a grim mental workout, but in Angela Hewitt’s hands abstract construction turned into dance.

She understands as well as anybody that the thrill of a fugue is as much physical as intellectual. She showed how the music’s mental complication and rhythmic energy work together in a rising spiral of excitement. Time and again, she would bring that energy together in a magnificent rhetorical flourish, capped with a final chord which she would hold and then fling off into silence with a vehement gesture, as if willing the sound to be bigger and more impressive than anything her hands and the piano could summon. The phrase “furious concentration” kept coming to my mind.

Working in tandem with this was the opposite impulse to linger over Bach’s ethereal harmonies, revealing areas of mystery lurking within the music’s iron progression. Hewitt made us feel each fugue inhabited its own poetic world, tinged with its own particular colour.

Even the plain and simple melody that is the basis for each fugue emerged differently each time; gravely beautiful for the first, stark and elemental for the second, lost and as if coming from a great distance in the ninth. Hewitt wasn’t afraid to use the full resources of the piano, bringing in the soft pedal to lend a romantic haze to a transition, or massively reinforcing the bass with ringing octaves to lend grandeur to an ending.

Finally, we arrived at the closing fugue, and the moment of maximum complexity where Bach introduces his own name translated into notes, all unfolded by Hewitt with epic and moving slowness. Then came the most frustrating moment in all music, where the fugue simply stops, as Bach never lived to complete it. Hewitt held us all in suspense, hands poised over the keyboard, and then let us down gently with Bach’s final, so-called “Deathbed” organ chorale prelude, arranged for piano.

Afterwards we sat in silence, wrapped in silent togetherness. It was the kind of moment we’ve all been waiting for.

Watch this concert in HD video until October 29 at wigmore-hall.org.uk