Health & Safety Information  — Updated January 25, 2023

Sunday, October 15, 2023 | 5:30 pm

Angela Hewitt, piano 

The Paul & Barbara Krieger Early Music Concert

Location: Shriver Hall

Hailed as "the preeminent Bach pianist of our time" (The Guardian), Angela Hewitt is renowned for her landmark recordings of his work and for the "contrasts, clarity, and warmth she brings to [his] intellectual marvels" (The Times, London). The British-Canadian pianist returns to Shriver Hall with Bach's Goldberg Variations, the composer's crowning achievement for the keyboard, a masterpiece of deep ambition and dazzling creativity.

"Angela Hewitt's Bach has long been a thing of wonder." -The Daily Telegraph

Angela Hewitt High Res 5 - credit Bernd Eberle.jpg

Angela Hewitt

One of the world’s leading pianists, Angela Hewitt regularly appears in recital and with major orchestras throughout Europe, the Americas and Asia. Her performances and recordings of Bach have drawn particular praise, marking her out as one of the composer's foremost interpreters of our time.

Highlights of Hewitt’s 2014/15 season include concerts with Washington’s National Symphony Orchestra (David Zinman) and Vancouver Symphony, Yomiuri Nippon Symphony and Japan Philharmonic orchestras, as well as Hamburger Symphoniker, Accademia Filarmonica di Bologna and Swedish Chamber Orchestra. She has toured in recent seasons with Camerata Salzburg and kammerorchesterbasel, while other recent orchestral appearances include the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, Orchestre symphonique de Montréal, and Orquestra Sinfônica Brasileira.

In January 2015 Angela Hewitt gives a series of recitals with mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter at the University of Chicago, the Celebrity Series of Boston, San Francisco Performances, Toronto’s Royal Conservatory and New York’s Le Poisson Rouge. As solo recitalist she also returns to London’s Wigmore Hall and performs at Bath Bachfest, Amsterdam’s Muziekgebouw, Copenhagen’s Mogens Dahl Koncertsal and the University of Washington.

Hewitt's award-winning recordings for Hyperion have garnered praise from around the world. Her recording of Bach’s The Art of Fugue is released in October 2014, and her ten-year project to record all the major keyboard works of Bach has been described as “one of the record glories of our age” (The Sunday Times). She was soloist for Ondine’s release of Messiaen’s Turangalîla Symphony with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra and Hannu Lintu in summer 2014. Her discography also includes CDs of Beethoven, Mozart, Schumann, Ravel, Chopin, Couperin, Rameau and Chabrier.

Born into a musical family, Angela Hewitt began her piano studies aged three, performing in public at four and a year later winning her first scholarship. She went on to study with French pianist Jean-Paul Sévilla and in 1985 she won the Toronto International Bach Piano Competition.

Hewitt was named ‘Artist of the Year’ at the 2006 Gramophone Awards. She was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2000 and was awarded an OBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours in 2006. She lives in London but also has homes in Ottawa and in Italy, where she is Artistic Director of the Trasimeno Music Festival in Umbria.

"The paramount quality of Angela Hewitt's piano playing is the joy it communicates. Underpinning it there is incontrovertible intellectual rigor; and there are great reserves of wisdom and technical finesse. But the thing that came across so strongly in this substantial recital was that she has an ability to seize upon the distinguishing traits of a piece of music, conceive them carefully in terms of the piano, and then, most importantly, interpret them in a way that speaks with candor, freshness and animation." - Daily Telegraph

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)

Goldberg Variations, BWV 988

View Notes

Program Subject to Change Without Notice