Angela Hewitt plays fortepiano with members of the Dunedin Consort at Wigmore Hall on Wednesday 16 September 2026: Haydn, CPE Bach, Martínez and Mozart.
Angela Hewitt was born in Ottawa in 1958, the daughter of a cathedral organist, and began the piano at three with her mother, won a scholarship at five and gave her first full recital at nine. She is, by fairly general consent, the Bach pianist of her generation: between 1994 and 2005 she recorded all his major keyboard works, an eleven-year project that shaped how a great many people now hear them. She is a Companion of the Order of Canada and holds an OBE.
The instrument is the reason to take this particular evening rather than the repertoire. Hewitt gave her first UK performance on a fortepiano in this hall in 2024, and the fortepiano is a different animal from the modern grand: lighter, faster to speak, quicker to die away, and the sound the eighteenth century actually wrote for.
Members of the Dunedin Consort join her at Wigmore Hall on Wednesday 16 September 2026. Haydn’s Symphony No. 6 in D, ‘Le matin’, and CPE Bach’s Keyboard Concerto in C come before the interval; Marianne Martines’s Sinfonia in C and Mozart’s Keyboard Concerto No. 14 after it. Martines was a Viennese composer whom Haydn taught and Mozart played duets with, and hearing her between the two of them is the argument the programme is making. The Dunedin Consort are Scotland’s leading period band.