Angela Hewitt: From child prodigy to poet of the piano

The Canadian pianist Angela Hewitt is famed for her Bach recitals, but she's about to release a Ravel collection. As Michael Church finds, she has the head, heart and spirit for it

In recital, Angela Hewitt is an elfin presence, bounding to the piano like a ballet dancer, purling off Bach Partitas as though they were thoughts that had just struck her. In conversation, she reveals a mind which you'd call "intellectual", were it not for the fact that it's put to such severely practical use. A paradox? No, just the ideal balance of head and heart, which the best music always requires. After 20 years of typecasting as Bach's representative on Earth, Hewitt is now branching off into Ravel: a good moment to see what makes this serenely successful Canadian pianist tick.

The ballet simile is exact, because until her teens Hewitt's future was a toss-up between the piano and pointe. Dance was excellent preparation for what she does now. Posture at the keyboard is crucial for warding off back-trouble, and in her view every performer needs to employ some theatricality. She even writes body-language instructions to herself ("Sit back") on the score.

The freshness of her Bach derives from her organist father, whose influence – together with that of her pianist mother – Hewitt acknowledges as formative. From him she learnt the arts of articulation and phrasing, and that knack of changing fingers silently on a key, which allows an unpedalled line to be absolutely smooth. "When I play the Partitas," she says, "I always have in mind the sound of the organ as he played it – those long, singing melodies, his frequent changes of colour. I also learnt from him the importance of having a road-map of where you're going." When you've four whirling voices in counterpoint, with subjects and countersubjects coming at you like a blizzard, a mental map is important. It's surprising how many pianists think they can do without one.

Like most pianists she was an infant prodigy, but looks back with gratitude on her parents' refusal to trade on that. "I performed a lot, but was intelligently managed. They refused an invitation for me to go on the Hollywood equivalent of the Letterman show when I was four. And I wasn't pushed into playing the Tchaikovsky concerto when I was 10, even though I might have managed it technically. I didn't play any Chopin until I was 12, and my first big Schumann was even later. These days kids are pushed younger and younger into things for which they are not emotionally ready. One marvels at their capabilities – but it's important to be allowed to be a child."

On the other hand, her first public recital was of Bach's Inventions. She's insistent that these should not be left too late. "I recently gave a masterclass at the Menuhin school, but none of the students had learnt any Bach. Yet he is the basis of all keyboard music. If you don't acquire early that sensitivity to sound and phrasing, you may never acquire it at all."

Behind such generalities lies the vexed question of how Bach should be played – and on what instrument. It's no surprise that she dislikes Rosalyn Tureck's pedestrian manner; she finds her compatriot Glenn Gould fascinating and maddening. Though she never knew him – he was a hermit by the time she arrived on the scene – she was once informed that he'd rung in to a radio station to ask who the player was, after catching one of her childhood recitals.

Her first instrument was a pedal piano, but as a teenager she had a harpsichord on which she "fooled about". "I'd get very excited for 10 minutes, then I'd realise I couldn't taper a phrase on it, and that frustrated me, as it still does. At that point I would always go back to the piano. As the piano has this capability, why not use it?" That word "taper" is the key: she despises the still-widespread style of Bach performance, where the dynamic of the lines has no rise and fall. "If you want to play the piano like that, go and play the harpsichord." Looming behind her is her Fazoli piano, which she thinks Bach – as an enthusiast for instrumental advance – would have eagerly approved of.

Her Hampstead garden flat, with its shelves of French literature, is cool and functional: here she gives pre-concert concerts to groups of friends, whose job is to respond and advise. This is typical of her methodical approach. She practises six hours a day, beginning with Bach, and spends long hours writing the liner notes to her own CDs. Before a recital, she stokes up on steak and salad and, afterwards, does a Pilates work-out. "That's to release the muscles I've been using so much. Otherwise you wake up in an even tenser state, which means you'll get worse as the days go on. I've seen too many pianists go under with muscle problems."

If her Bach seems effortless, her Ravel is dazzling. Is there anything technical she can't do? "Sure, lots of things. Liszt's Feux Follets, or Chopin's G sharp minor Etude." This famous finger-twister demands an unbroken stream of very fast right-hand thirds. "For that you have to have your fingers attached to a part of the brain that I don't. But anyway, I'm not interested in doing all that work for a piece that lasts a mere two minutes. You have to choose your priorities."

Her negative priorities are expressed in forthright terms. Her recent CD of Bach transcriptions contains old favourites and new rediscoveries, but pointedly nothing from Busoni, whose transcriptions she dismisses as bombastic. She's played Rachmaninov in concert, but wouldn't care if she never played a note of him again; she loathes Scriabin. She loves Schubert's songs, too, but she can't stand the meandering unevenness of his sonatas. "Somebody once said that with those you could fall asleep and wake up in paradise, but I prefer to go fully conscious to paradise, rather than fall asleep along the way." Her positive priorities include Beethoven (whom she's trying to persuade Hyperion to let her record), Scarlatti (whose 560 sonatas Hyperion once tried to persuade her to record), and Couperin (whose works sit on the piano as we speak).

Much though she still loves Bach, she's keen to evade her 18th-century typecasting. Hence the complete Ravel, whose music she has always defended against charges such as the one made by Stravinsky, who accused him of being "only a Swiss clockmaker". She quotes Ravel himself in rebuttal of this: "One doesn't need to open one's chest to show that one has a heart." You need, she says, a highly developed sense of colour and rhythm, and liberal amounts of poetry and imagination.

Plus energy. She plays 80 concerts a year – conducting some herself from the keyboard – and gives regular master classes. It's a ferocious workload. When I ask what she's doing with living composers, she replies that she's due soon to premiere a concerto by the stage composer Dominic Muldowney, which he describes as "classically oriented, but with heart". "But"?!

So whose music does she listen out for, when new works are being unveiled? An awkward pause, then: "Maybe there are some geniuses out there, whom I haven't latched on to yet." And maybe there aren't? "Maybe... I'm sorry, but I'm really very happy with the dead greats."

Angela Hewitt's double CD of Ravel's complete solo piano music is released on the Hyperion label on 2 April