Mozart: Piano Sonatas K. 457, 533, 545, 570 & 576

This is the third and final album in the Canadian pianist Angela Hewitt’s survey of Mozart’s piano sonatas, and marks her 50th release on the Hyperion label. Hewitt’s sharp attunement to the drama these sonatas often contain is evident in her gripping account of the finale to the Piano Sonata No. 14 in C minor, where the world of Beethoven seems but a step away. She is no less adept at distilling the sense of gentle melancholy which suffuses the Adagio in B Minor (K540). But there is lightness and jocularity in Hewitt’s playing, too, not least in her delicately pointed traversal of the 12 Variations on “Ah, vous dirai-je Maman”, and in the balletic “Rondo” of the Piano Sonata No. 16 in C Major. The crystalline quality of the Fazioli piano Hewitt uses falls somewhere between a fortepiano of Mozart’s period and a modern concert Steinway, lending an extra transparency to these already luminescent performances.