ar festival |: s: | onore 2022: Angela Hewitt, The Woman Who Lost the Piano

“Inspiration” is the slogan of this year’s Classical Music Festival ar |: s: | onore. What is meant is musical creativity that can be inspired by role models. “We present original masterpieces and show how these in turn have greatly influenced the work of other composers.” , says Marcus Shermer, “Sometimes we are dealing with witty and wholly independent vocal creations, but sometimes we also find elegant artistic ‘stealing’, which in its cheerful and innocent rudeness has the same peculiarity,” emphasizes the pianist and art director.

A highlight of the eighth edition of his festival, the 59-year-old from Graz announced the concert “Goldberg & Goldberg Re-Loaded”. Angela Hewitt won this Bach project. The Canadian is a proven Bach expert who recorded Mr. Baroque’s entire work on 14 CDs between 1994 and 2014 for the British record label Hyperion. Including, of course, Goldberg’s variations. Ever since she won the Washington Piano Competition in 1975 with her brilliant and powerful “Claver’s Exercise” when she was 17, the 1741 work, with 30 variations and tone at the beginning and end, has been Hewitt’s constant companion.

Anyway, ar |: s: | Another band with the 64-year-old pianist promises “probably the best Bach interpreter of our days” and after the break “Dream Quartet” with Christian Pakanek (accordion), Benjamin Schmidt (violin), Petrett Chico (guitar) and Christian Wendt (double vocals) ), which would respond imaginatively to Bach’s single.

Angela Hewitt, who, as far as we know, is making a guest appearance in Graz for the first time, lives alternately in London, Ottawa and Umbria, where she has run the Trasimeno Music Festival since 2005 – also bringing together artists from the region. She also likes to collaborate with writers on her programmes, for example with Britons Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan.

Incidentally, the 64-year-old, in addition to Bach, a wide-ranging repertoire from Mozart and Chopin to Liszt and Ravel to Messianne, involuntarily made headlines in February 2020: after recording for Beethoven’s album in Berlin, movers from the transport company the fall of loved ones left the party grand piano “It’s broken!” I mourned the very precious Fazioli F278, the only one in the world with four pedals that I had played on for 17 years. “He was my best friend. I hope my grand piano can be happy in piano heaven.”