With this release, pianist Angela Hewitt concludes her cycle of Beethoven's piano sonatas. Listeners may have disagreed with her interpretive decisions along the way, but the set has commitment and technical facility that make it impossible to ignore, and so it is with the Piano Sonata No. 29 in B flat major, Op. 106 ("Hammerklavier"), and the Piano Sonata No. 32 in C minor, Op. 111. The most distinctive music here comes in the first movement of the "Hammerklavier," where Hewitt runs counter to type with a reading that ...
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With this release, pianist Angela Hewitt concludes her cycle of Beethoven's piano sonatas. Listeners may have disagreed with her interpretive decisions along the way, but the set has commitment and technical facility that make it impossible to ignore, and so it is with the Piano Sonata No. 29 in B flat major, Op. 106 ("Hammerklavier"), and the Piano Sonata No. 32 in C minor, Op. 111. The most distinctive music here comes in the first movement of the "Hammerklavier," where Hewitt runs counter to type with a reading that tones down the sense of struggle and of being at the limits of a player's capability that the work usually has. Taking it relatively slowly, she places emphasis on the quieter passages, with the material in the big opening chords taking on the character of punctuating exclamations. She makes her ideas work, for the genius of the movement lies less in its Ninth Symphony-like extremes than in its density and its sudden turns of mood. The fugal finale in Hewitt's hands becomes not a...
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