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 Golderg Variations, the composer's crowing 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
About the sponsor
Paul and Barbara Krieger, great lovers and players of early music, endowed this concert in 2003. Paul, a retired pathologist, has turned to another great love: the study of music theory. Barbara was the executive director of the Vineyard Theater, an off-Broadway theater that she founded in 1981 that garnered two Pulitzer Prizes among many other honors. Currently, she is the artistic director of New York City’s Children’s Theater, a family theater and education company that she founded in 2001. The Kriegers have a collection of historical keyboard, wind, and string instruments, all of which they enjoy playing together with their many musical friends.
Angela Hewitt
One of the world’s leading concert pianists, Angela Hewitt appears in recital and as soloist with major orchestras throughout Europe, the Americas, Australia, and Asia. Her interpretations of the music of J.S. Bach have established her as one of the composer’s foremost interpreters of our time.
Born in 1958 into a musical family, Hewitt began her piano studies at age three, performed in public at four, and a year later won her first scholarship. From 1963 to 1973 she studied at Toronto’s Royal Conservatory of Music with Earle Moss and Myrtle Guerrero, after which she completed her Bachelor of Music in Performance at the University of Ottawa in the class of French pianist Jean-Paul Sévilla, graduating at the age of 18. She was a prizewinner in numerous piano competitions in Europe, Canada, and the U.S., but it was her triumph in the 1985 Toronto International Bach Piano Competition, held in memory of Glenn Gould, that truly launched her international career.
Hewitt’s award-winning cycle for Hyperion Records of all the major keyboard works of Bach has been described as “one of the record glories of our age” (The Sunday Times). Begun in 1994, it culminated with her much-awaited recording of Bach’s Art of Fugue in 2014. Her extensive discography also includes solo recordings of the complete Beethoven Sonatas (she is one of very few women ever to record the complete cycle), Scarlatti, Handel, Couperin, Rameau, Haydn, Chopin, Schumann, Liszt, Fauré, Debussy, Chabrier, Ravel, Granados and Messiaen. She has won four Juno Awards, including one for her album of Mozart Concertos with Canada’s National Arts Centre Orchestra.
In 2020 she was awarded two prestigious prizes: the City of Leipzig Bach Medal (being the first woman in its 17-year history to receive the award), and the Wigmore Hall Gold Medal in recognition of some 80 performances over the past 35 years in London’s most prestigious chamber music venue.
In 2022 Hewitt was Chairman of the Jury of the prestigious International Bach Competition in Leipzig (piano category). The 2022-23 season sees her performing with orchestras in Finland, Denmark, Montreal, Ottawa, Victoria BC, Prague, Germany, and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra in New York. Recitals take her to, among others, Barcelona, San Francisco, Seattle, Vienna, Amsterdam, Cambridge, Leipzig, and the famous La Fenice Opera House in Venice. She is also an artist-in-residence at London’s Wigmore Hall.
In 2006 Hewitt was awarded an OBE from Queen Elizabeth II in her 80th birthday honors. A frequent guest on BBC Radio, she was invited to be the sole live performer in the two hours of classical music broadcast on BBC Radio 3 immediately following the funeral and committal of Queen Elizabeth II on September 19, 2022. In 2015, Hewitt was promoted to a Companion of the Order of Canada—her country’s highest honor. She is a member of the Royal Society of Canada, has seven honorary doctorates, and is a Visiting Fellow of Peterhouse College, Cambridge. Her website is angelahewitt.com.
"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
