I've Got Some Nerve

"Get down in the keys." I heard my mother say it a thousand times over the years that I listened to her piano lessons. I do not know how many students she had in her lifetime of teaching piano, but I know she was a great and good teacher. 

"Get down in the keys, Angela," is what I would like to say to Angela Hewitt, who has recorded ALL of Bach's piano music. It took her 11 years, and she calls Bach's piano music, particularly his Well-Tempered Clavier "some of the most demanding music ever written."

I have no doubt of it.

The concertos that I know well, from Murray Perahia and others, have become mine, so to speak. I hear them whether or not the CD is playing. And so I have bought Angela Hewitt's recordings of them because she is heralded as a Bach expert. And so she must be. 

Still, I'd like her to get down in the keys. By that I don't mean play louder. It isn't necessarily volume. It's the tone. I mean get a more solid tone. No ticking of the ivories. I know she knows how. I hear it in the Fantasia and some of the Partitas and in some movements of the concertos.

But who am I to make such comments? She's the artist, and highly acclaimed throughout the world, at that.