Festival Strings Lucerne | Angela Hewitt conductor and piano soloist

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)
Concerto for Piano and Orchestra in D major BWV 1054

Wolfgang Amadé Mozart (1756-1791)
Concerto for Piano and Orchestra in E-flat major, K. 271 Jenamy
Concerto for Piano and Orchestra in E-flat major, K. 449

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)
Concerto for Piano and Orchestra in D minor BWV 1052
Four piano concertos in one evening! The Canadian pianist Angela Hewitt has taken on this marathon assignment, which entails dedicating herself to the two composers who are, perhaps not in technique but certainly in overall musical terms, the most demanding of all: Johann Sebastian Bach and Wolfgang Amadé Mozart. Whoever plays Bach needs to have a strong awareness of form and historical understanding, a feeling for musical discourse and rhetoric – and in addition, as the composer himself demanded, “a cantabile way of playing.” Every note counts here; nothing is insignificant. Meanwhile, for Mozart you need spirit and spontaneity, a sense of the joy of playing and quick-wittedness. Hewitt commands all of these qualities. “She plays Mozart just like he wanted it: ‘with the necessary expression and gusto,’ according to the twofold ideal of a kind of execution that is as textually precise as it is animated,” wrote the Neue Zürcher Zeitung in the spring of 2015 about Hewitt’s most recent recording of Mozart concertos.