Intense concentration: Angela Hewitt in performance and, right, during the recording sessions for The Art of Fugue

THE ART OF Angela Hewitt Philip Clark meets the Canadian pianist at her home in north London to

Tjourney into the much misunderstood musical maze that is Bach’s The Art of Fugue wenty years after she began recording Johann Sebastian Bach’s complete music for keyboard, The Art of Fugue decided it was time to seek out Angela Hewitt. Foraging an existence as a 90-minute composition, incomplete and of uncertain instrumental allegiance, rooted in D minor throughout, and with latitude enough in the notation for an unthinking player to perform it with all the joy of shuffling data around a spreadsheet, can’t be easy. You see your sexier, leaner, more clubbable siblings like the Goldberg Variations and the Well-Tempered Clavier achieve the sort of place in people’s hearts that must remain for you forever a fantasy because, to be frank, you’re not even sure

10 GRAMOPHONE OCTOBER 2014

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