Replete with all the Angela Hewitt virtues—among them, unfailing
clarity, innate elegance, an unerring sense of proportion, a finely
honed mastery of style, melodic finesse and an unobtrusive grasp of
harmonic rhythm—these are exemplary performances. Stylistically, they
are very much of their time, falling midway between the 'Beethovenian',
'revisionist' tendency of the mid-20th century, repudiating the earlier
essentially miniaturist 'Dresden China' tradition, and the sometimes
rather antiseptic, musicologically-'enlightened' approach of the
century's final third. The prevailing tonal palette, from soloist and
orchestra alike, is appropriately lean but always beautifully focused
and elegantly applied. Operatic in the best sense, Hewitt is more
concerned with dialogue, not only between the two hands but within all
levels of the texture, than with conventional notions of 'vocal'
cantabile.
But what finally renders Mozart's operas supreme (and I maintain,
loosely, that he never wrote anything but opera) is not the matchless
subtlety and characterisation of the dialogue, but the continuous
development of the individual characters and the relationships between
them. What I most miss here, and I recognise that I may be in a small
minority, is precisely that feeling of development, which necessarily
relies on vivid and varied characterisation in the first palce. I feel
this throughout, though never more so than in the C minor Concerto,
especially the slow movement, where the uniquely Mozartian tension
between harmonically loaded melody and the essentially neutral, often
near-static nature of metre is spoiled by an excessive sense of
symmetry. (BBC Music Magazine)
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