Beautifully toned Bach from Hewitt

REVIEW:Michael Dervan enjoys the full complexity and spirit of Bach performed by Angela Hewitt, Julia Schröder and the Swiss chamber orchestra at the NCH

Bach– Concerto in D BWV1054.

Frank Martin– Pavane couleur du temps.

Bach– Concerto in G minor BWV1058.

Frank Martin– Etudes.

Bach– Concerto in D minor BWV1052.

The Swiss chamber orchestra kammerorchesterbasel (they like the name in one word without capital letters) is not to be confused with the Basler Kammerorchester, which was founded in 1926 by Paul Sacher. Sacher, who married into a pharmaceutical empire in 1934, used some of his vast fortune (he died a multi-billionaire in 1999) in the pursuit of music, and was one of the 20th century’s most important commissioners of new music.

Sacher’s legacy is of course open to kammerorchesterbasel to exploit, and their concert with Canadian Bach specialist Angela Hewitt at the National Concert Hall on Tuesday interleaved Hewitt playing Bach concertos with two works by Swiss composer Frank Martin (1890-1974), one of which was a Sacher commission.

The Études for strings of 1956 applies the techniques of instrumental studies to a string orchestra, with the particular challenges specified in the titles of the movements in the manner of Debussy's studies for piano – pour le pizzicato, or pour l'expression et le 'sostenuto'.

Martin had a peculiar ingenuity when it came to originality of sonority, so the exercise in pizzicato includes unusual effects in sliding chords, and in the third Étude casts most of the orchestra aside to give the floor to violas and cellos. The writing is intricate and challenging for the players and rich in incident for the listener. The kammerorchester- basel, directed from the violin by Julia Schröder, played it with a dryness that gave the piece an almost Stravinskian tinge. The much earlier (1920) Pavane couleur du tempsis a lighter, less distinctive work.

The main attraction of the evening, of course, was the first opportunity for Irish audiences to hear Angela Hewitt playing concertos by the composer with whom she has been so closely associated for the last quarter of a century. Hewitt’s style in Bach is clear and mellifluous, the tone always beautifully controlled, the leading line always presented in clear relief.

She offered three concertos, the first two (BWV1054 and 1058) still much more familiar as the violin concertos in E and A minor, the third, BWV1052, the most popular of all Bach’s keyboard concertos. It was in this final offering that Hewitt and her sensitively lean-toned partners in kammerorchesterbasel seemed to be most successful in representing the full complexity of the spirit of Bach.