Angela Hewitt: Well-Tempered Clavier World Tour
Pianist Angela Hewitt has announced that she will be devoting the entire current season to continuing her tour of Bach’s “The Well-Tempered Clavier”. When she finally passes the finish line in October of 2008, after over a year of continous performing, she will have visited 52 cities in 25 countries on six continents – the editors of the Guiness Book of Records better take note. The gargantuan dimensions of “The Well-Tempered Clavier” have been an obstacle for most performers to playing it live: In its entirety, “The Well-Tempered Clavier” takes between four and five hours and demands an enormous exertion from even the most experienced of artists: “To perform the entire Well-Tempered Clavier in concert is one of the greatest challenges a pianist can undertake.”, Angela Hewitt remarked at the outset of the tour, “Apart from the sheer concentration and stamina it takes to perform two marathon concerts, it is also the greatest test of musical intelligence there is.” Next to offering a Limited Edition 4-CD box set of Angela Hewitt’s award-winning recording of “The Well-Tempered Clavier”, her record company Hyperion will also be dedicating a special DVD to the project, to be released in February.
Until now, “The Well-Tempered Clavier”, despite its epic length, has been a remarkable box office success. The two concerts Angela Hewitt gave at Carnegie Hall in October of last year, for example, were sold out many weeks prior to the event. Similar scenarios are expected to occur as she prepares for appearances at other noteworthy concert halls around the globe, including the Philharmonie in Cologne, the Herkulesaal in Munich, La Fenice in Venice, the Tokyo Opera City Concert Hall, and the Royal Festival Hall in London.
To Angela Hewitt, what makes these performances of “The Well-Tempered Clavier” so challenging is the dual task of being true to certain conventions of the time the piece was written in as well as playing an active role as an instrumentalist: “Bach left no markings in the score as to how this music was to be played, so the decisions are your own”, according to Angela Hewitt, “But they must always be within the realm of what was called “good taste” at the time, and reflect the proper style of Baroque music.”
She has already taken one important decision right at the start, playing “The Well-Tempered Clavier” on a Piano – an instrument which didn’t even exist at Bach’s time: Angela Hewitt defended her choice from a musical perspective: “I feel the piano is the ideal instrument for such music, allowing me to fully bring out the immense range of emotion in these works.”
“The Well-Tempered Clavier” tour has already been a rollercoaster ride for Angela Hewitt, who had to cope with her mother falling seriously ill in December, rejoiced at recording a new CD with Cellist Daniel Müller-Schott and had to deal with “the cougher’s brigade” at her concerts in Venice: “I have never heard such a din! Fortunately, during the first short pause after the fourth Prelude and Fugue, several members of the audience went “Shhh!!!” and they understood.”
Picture by Simon Fowler
Homepage: Angela Hewitt
Homepage: “The Well-Tempered Clavier” tour of Angela Hewitt
Homepage: Hyperion Records
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