Angela Hewitt occupies a unique position among today’s leading pianists. With a wide-ranging repertoire and frequent appearances in recital and with major orchestras throughout Europe, the Americas and Asia, she is also an award-winning recording artist whose performances of Bach have established her as one of the composer’s foremost interpreters. In 2020 she received the City of Leipzig Bach Medal: a huge honour that for the first time in its 17-year history was awarded to a woman.
In September 2016, Hewitt began her Bach Odyssey, performing the complete keyboard works of Bach in a series of 12 recitals. The cycle was presented in London’s Wigmore Hall, New York’s 92nd Street Y, and in Ottawa, Tokyo and Florence, concluding in 2022. After her performances of the complete Well-Tempered Clavier at the 2019 Edinburgh Festival, the critic of the London Times wrote, “…the freshness of Hewitt’s playing made it sound as though no one had played this music before.”
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). Her large discography includes albums of Couperin, Rameau, Scarlatti, Chopin, Schumann, Liszt, Fauré, Debussy, Chabrier, Ravel, Messiaen and Granados. She has also recorded the complete Beethoven and Mozart Piano Sonatas, and her third album of Scarlatti Sonatas will be released in November 2026. A regular in the USA Billboard chart, her album Love Songs hit the top of the specialist classical chart in the UK and stayed there for months after its release. In 2015 she was inducted into Gramophone Magazine’s Hall of Fame thanks to her popularity with music lovers around the world. All her Hyperion recordings are now available on the major streaming platforms, considerably increasing her worldwide audience.
Conducting from the piano, Hewitt has led the Toronto and Vancouver Symphony orchestras, the Hong Kong and the Copenhagen Philharmonic orchestras, the Lucerne Festival Strings, the Kammerorchester Basel, the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra, the Britten Sinfonia, the Swedish and Zurich Chamber orchestras, the Salzburg Camerata, the orchestra of RAI Torino, the Orchestra Ensemble Kanazawa in Japan, and in 2019 made her debut playing and conducting Bach with the Vienna Tonkünstler Orchestra in Vienna’s Musikverein. She has also conducted the Cameristi della Scala in Milan’s La Scala and at the Bologna Festival.
Born into a musical family, Hewitt began her piano studies aged three, performing in public at four and a year later winning her first scholarship. She studied with Jean-Paul Sévilla at the University of Ottawa, and in 1985 won the Toronto International Bach Piano Competition which launched her career. In 2018 Angela received the Governor General’s Lifetime Achievement Award, and in 2015 she received the highest honour from her native country – becoming a Companion of the Order of Canada (which is given to only 165 living Canadians at any one time). In 2006 she was awarded an OBE from Queen Elizabeth II.
Along with performing a vast amount of the standard repertoire, Angela has also commissioned new works including two piano concertos: the Second Piano Concerto of Dominic Muldowney (premiered with the BBC Symphony in 2002); and in 2017 “Nameless Seas” by Canadian-Finnish composer Matthew Whittall (with the National Arts Centre Orchestra). Canadian composers such as Oskar Morawetz, Steven Gellman, Gary Kulesha, David McIntyre, and Patrick Cardy also wrote pieces dedicated to her. In 2010 she commissioned seven composers from around the world to write short pieces inspired by Bach which were published in a collection (along with several of her own Bach transcriptions) entitled “Angela Hewitt’s Bach Book”. In February 2022 she was presented with The Oskar Morawetz Award for Excellence in Music Performance by the Ontario Arts Council.
Described as “one of the busiest pianists on earth” by London’s Evening Standard (2005), Angela also devotes herself to nurturing new talent. Her masterclasses, both around the world and online, are hugely appreciated, and every few years she gives a week-long masterclass in Italy for gifted pianists. She was also part of Piano Six from 1994-2004: a project which took live music into the remote communities of Canada—giving concerts, masterclasses, and playing for school children across the country. Her writings on music include all the liner notes for her CD recordings as well as several book reviews for the Times Literary Supplement.
In 2005, Angela launched the Trasimeno Music Festival in the heart of Umbria, Italy of which she was Artistic Director for 21 years. She brought an international audience to stunning venues, performing in almost every concert with both established and young musicians.
In September 2026, she created the Umbria Festival di Angela Hewitt which will bring her even closer to Umbria and its people. The first festival, in autumn 2027, will be presented as part of the Sagra Musicale Umbra, celebrating its 90th anniversary.
As an Ambassador for “Orkidstra”– a Sistema-inspired social development program in Ottawa’s inner city, she brings attention to how music can bring children and young adults together through the joy of making music and learning an instrument, as well as how it teaches valuable skills such as commitment, teamwork and tolerance.
She is a member of the Royal Society of Canada, has seven honorary doctorates, and is a Visiting Fellow of Peterhouse College in Cambridge. In 2020 Angela was awarded the Wigmore Medal in recognition of her services to music and relationship with the hall over the past 40 years.
“It was a positive sensation. The Canadian pianist is one of the reliably mesmerising musicians of the day. You sit entranced…. It would have been more accurate to say I was floating just below the ceiling. She seems to me the complete performer, gifted not only with fingers that imprint each note with a svelte newness and a mind that is not deflected by such precision work from calmly surmising the larger structure, but also with the ability to convey a spiritual seriousness that nonetheless does not exclude an utter charm.”
Paul Driver writing of her Wigmore Hall recital in September 2003 in The Sunday Times.
“An instant link from head and heart to fingertips
What draws the listener to Angela Hewitt… has to do with contact. Most piano performances arrive in translation: the inner musician making a decision, then issuing a command that makes its way through the body onto the keyboard and into the ear. The process alters the results. Ms. Hewitt is one of those rare musicians who seem to get something into their heads and hearts and find it at their fingertips instantaneously. To fuel this leap must require a fund of psychic energy beyond the average capacity. Good musicians are good athletes, not in the muscular sense but in the staying power of their imaginations. This pianist’s resolve to imbue every musical moment with an unrelenting sense of theater would exhaust most of us in 10 minutes.”
Bernard Holland in The New York Times, February 2007
Updated September 2026