Bach. Always Bach, it always begins with Bach. Ask most musicians, and the answer is usually the same. All roads, at least musically, appear to begin with that most hard-working, inspired and inspiring of church organists, God's musician, who was the complete composer. For Canadian pianist Angela Hewitt, who performs at the National Concert Hall on Thursday night, the music of Johann Sebastian Bach was there from the beginning.
"Church music was always part of my life. My father was the church organist in the cathedral in Ottawa for 49 years, I grew up hearing that music, it was like breathing. When I was a child I danced a lot, and a lot of the time I was dancing to the music of Bach. Every Sunday I heard those wonderful organ works, the fugues and the toccatas. My parents were my first teachers and they started me off on Bach. They helped me understand that his music is the basis of piano technique."
She began ballet at three years of age, about the same time that she discovered the piano. Within a year, she was performing in public and won her first scholarship at five. Her playing is elegant and intelligent, expressive but subtle and beautifully thorough. Here is a musician who wants to understand and then convey that understanding. There are no tricks, no sentimentality; her clarity of tone is too graceful to risk becoming academic. Above all, she is alert to idiom. Even now, more than 20 years since she first recorded it, her interpretation of Bach's English Suite No 6 in D minor retains its nuanced ease. Hewitt is a good talker, lively and emphatic; she often laughs her girl's laugh and although now approaching 50, sounds like a teenager as she praises Bach's endless invention.
She sounds as if she enjoys being alive. Her explanations are precise without being pedantic. When she refers to "unravelling" a piece of music, she makes it sound like a watchmaker taking a clock in order to see how it works. "You have to unravel a piece, and then think about how to put it together. I try to understand how the composer was thinking at the time, what made him write the notes like that." The essays she writes to accompany her recordings are as astute as they are enthusiastic. "I do a lot of research and I enjoy, I love finding out how these composers lived, the sort of lives they had. It all helps to bring one closer to the music and as for the writing, well, I like that. My mother was an English teacher and she taught me to write well."
Hewitt has recorded all of Bach's major keyboard work, an 11-year, 18-CD project she completed in 2005, and although she is not a baroque specialist, and her discography is wide-ranging, including Chopin, Schumann, Ravel and Messiaen and some of Beethoven's most iconic piano sonatas, her playing of Bach has secured her position as a near definitive interpreter of his work.
Central to this is her interpretation of the Goldberg Variations. In the context of this work, which dates from 1741, it is impossible to avoid asking her, a Canadian, about the presence of her countryman Glenn Gould and what impact his playing of it had on her. "He was always present, he always seemed to be on television on Sunday night and yes, he was a genius but he always did everything different, the fast parts more slowly, the slow parts faster. He was eccentric and well, he did things his way, and then he decided to stop recording and really became a recluse." All of this is said with humour. The eccentric Gould may have been a vivid presence, but he was not an influence. Ironically, she is now every bit as iconic as Gould once was.
"There was always music at home. My father was English. He had been offered the post of organist at Westminster Cathedral but he turned it down to go to Canada." On the night of our interview, she is in Switzerland about to have dinner with friends. Although her parents noticed her talent, she was not treated as a piano prodigy. "I danced, played the violin and the recorder, went to a normal school, my parents were my first music teachers.
" It was not until I was older that I did my school work in the mornings and had my afternoons for music."
She made her public debut when she was nine years old, with a recital at Toronto's Royal Conservatory of Music. Yet Hewitt, who speaks German, French and Italian makes it all sound incredibly, dauntingly normal. By 25 she had won several important competitions, including international Bach prizes and was also settled in London, where she still lives. "I like Europe but I also love Canada, it's home." She also has a home in Umbria built on land she saw on the internet. Hewitt is giving a great deal back to music and founded the Trasimento Music Festival in Umbria in 2005.
Bach has led her to 18th century French composers such as Rameau and Couperin.
In August she begins a world tour during which she will perform from both books of Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavier in a series of 100 concerts, beginning in Oslo and concluding in China in 2008. The tour's Dublin date is June 2008, about a year to the day from now. There is a sense of order about that. "I'm very organised - I have to be - running three websites, 100 concerts" - not to mention three homes, rehearsals, recordings and all that travel.