Featured Album October 2023: Angela Hewitt "Mozart: Piano Sonatas K310-311 & 330-333"
For our seventh featured album, we're very pleased to introduce a brand new release from one of the piano world's stalwarts, Angela Hewitt. Continuing her longstanding relationship with Hyperion Records, she presents the latest in her interpretations of Mozart's virtuosic piano repertoire. Released this month, it's hot off the press and Hewitt's dexterity and musicality is sure to impress, just as it has throughout her long and successful career.
Mozart: Piano Sonatas K310-311 & 330-333
Angela Hewitt
OUR FEATURED ALBUM FOR OCTOBER 2023
Click here to order now!
From the artist's press release…
Angela Hewitt’s voyage of discovery through Mozart’s piano sonatas is proving a joy, the works sounding newly minted in vital, alert accounts which respect their scale and sensibility while revealing influences of Mozart’s orchestral and concerto writing of the period.
Track Listing:
- Piano Sonata in D Major K311
- Piano Sonata in A Minor K310
- Piano Sonata in C Major K330
- Fantasia in C Minor K396 (completed by Maximilian Stadler)
- Fantasia in D Minor K397
- Piano Sonata in A Major K331
- Piano Sonata in F Major K332
- Piano Sonata in B Flat Major K333
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Why The Early Music Shop loves "Mozart: Piano Sonatas K310-311 & 330-333":
The great Austrian-born pianist Artur Schnabel (1882–1951) had some wise words to offer about Mozart and his piano sonatas: ‘Children are given Mozart because of the small quantity of the notes; grown-ups avoid Mozart because of the great quality of the notes’; and ‘the notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes – ah, that is where the art resides! And finally, and perhaps most well-known of all about the sonatas, ‘Too easy for children, and too difficult for artists!’
Canadian pianist Angela Hewitt will know all too well what Schnabel meant in this well-balanced 2CD programme of six Mozart sonatas, the second recording of her Mozart series. Her famed clarity of sound, nimble finger-work and judicious pedalling, are all put to the service of the music, drawing out as much expressive power as possible while retaining the boundaries of late eighteenth-century sensibilities. Though Hewitt plays on her customary Fazoli piano, a bright-toned, responsive instrument, it’s clear that she knows what it’s like to play these sonatas on a fortepiano of the period – what’s possible, and what’s not, and she attempts to recapture something of the composer’s own excitement as instrument technology developed. It was a point she emphasised and briefly demonstrated during a visit to the Snape branch of The Early Music Shop in 2022, when she tried out the Paul McNulty fortepiano after an 1805 instrument by Walter & Sohn.
This new recording contains some of the most well-known of Mozart’s piano sonatas, including the ever-popular K331 with its bustling ‘alla turca’ rondo finale, and the F major K332, both from 1783. But perhaps less expected is when Hewitt taps into a vein of deep pathos and not a little drama in the A minor Sonata (K310) of 1778, possibly written following the death of Mozart’s mother, and the exquisite Fantasias in D minor (K397) and C minor (K396). The latter might recall two of Mozart’s greatest piano concertos in the same keys, but for this listener Hewitt’s account of the Sonata in A minor – not a key Mozart often uses as the tonal centre of his pieces – is a treasure trove. But then repeated listening of this whole collection reveals more about Mozart’s compositional genius and Hewitt’s interpretative response. This artist at least has confounded Schnabel’s quip.
Mozart: Piano Sonatas K310-311 & 330-333 is available from The Early Music Shop - buy online or in our Snape Maltings showroom now!