Bach Arrangements

Since Bach constantly reworked his own music, it’s always been seen as fair game that others should do so, too. Angela Hewitt’s disc of Bach arrangements thus stands in a noble tradition, as well as carrying it boldly into the future. But if three of these 17 short pieces are Hewitt’s own inventions, others are welcome discoveries from the nearly forgotten past. None of Busoni’s majestic arrangements is here, but instead, we find fascinating pieces by a plethora of English composers, including Lord Berbers, Herbert Howells, and William Walton. Hewitt’s own liner notes are a mine of information–some of it comic, much of it illuminating–as well as a guide to her keyboard philosophy. And her playing is as superb as we now expect. In D’Albert’s version of Bach’s stupendous Passacaglia in C Minor, she somehow manages to make the piano sound like a large organ echoing through a church. In other modes, she can be plangent, frisky, hesitant, or imbued with the most gorgeous cantabile; she seems to have a hotline to the religious fervor Bach wanted to evince. This disc may be built out of a collection of favorite encores, but in sum it’s a feast. –Michael Church

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