In review--Happy birthday Handel & Haydn
Angela Hewitt Plays Handel & Haydn Hyperion Records In the past I have listened to award-winning Canadian pianist Angela Hewitt’s Bach recordings, which I found as delicious as the Bach interpretations of the late Glenn Gould (also Canadian). So when I put the Handel & Haydn CD into my player, I thought I was listening to Bach. I even pulled the CD out of my computer to make sure that Hyperion had not made a mistake and accidentally put a Bach recording in the jewel case. They had not. I read Hewitt’s liner notes in which she discussed the similarities between George Frideric Handel’s Suite No 2 in F major and Bach’s repertoire. “If you play this for somebody without telling them who wrote it, I bet the last person they would name would be Handel. Many would say Bach.” I would say the same about Chaconne (with 21 variations) in G major , which Hewitt opens the recording. But why should any of this surprise me? Handel and Bach were contemporaries, both of Germanic ...