‘I’ll take it!’ said Ted Perry, Hyperion’s managing director, over the telephone. ‘But you haven’t heard it yet!’ I exclaimed. ‘I don’t need to—I know it will be good’, was his reply. ‘But only if you agree to record the complete Bach.’ My dream had just come true.

That was in early 1994 when I had taken it upon myself to record an album of the Two- and Three-Part Inventions, along with the Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue and the C minor Fantasia. Eight years before, Deutsche Grammophon had released a Bach recording I had done for them soon after winning the Toronto International Bach Piano Competition. It sold extremely well, got great press, and was nominated for a Gramophone Award. Nonetheless DG chose not to sign me: such are the vagaries of the recording industry. So I bided my time, gave a huge number of concerts, learned more repertoire, and continued to grow as an artist and person. That wasn’t a bad thing. But by late 1993 I simply was not willing to wait any longer. As is typical of me, I took matters into my own hands. I got some funding from a Canadian investment bank, Wood Gundy (thanks to their London manager who had been a chorister in my father’s choir in Ottawa and had grown up in our neigh­bourhood), and also from the Canadian High Commission in London. The rest I put in myself. I asked my former producer at Deutsche Grammophon, Otto Ernst Wohlert (who had since taken early retirement; he was best known for working with Karajan on his early Beethoven cycle for DG), to produce it and to find me the rest of the team and a suitable venue. We decided on the Beethovensaal in Hannover where they had a Steinway on which Kempff had made several recordings (including his wonderful one of Bach transcriptions). A young ‘Tonmeister’ (sound engi­neer) was recommended by DG as one of their ‘bright lights’. His name was Ludger Böckenhoff. The tuner was to be Robert Ritscher who had also done my DG recording, but at the last minute he wasn’t available, so Gerd Finkenstein was sent in his place. I remember those sessions as though they were yesterday.

Experience at recording came to me as a tiny girl. My father had sophisticated recording equipment for the time (a Magnecorder) and when I was four years old he taped me and my brother playing our respective exam pieces at home and in the hall of Christ Church Cathedral in Ottawa, where he was organist. I still have a copy of those tapes. He always meant to splice them together, taking out the mistakes, but he never did. Instead we get me playing an Andante by Steibelt about ten times in a row until it was perfect. Listening to what I’ve just recorded, and then striving to improve on the first version, has always been fascinating to me. To this day I have more or less kept the pattern established in that first recording in Hannover. After listening intently to the first two versions of a complete work (in this case I played all fifteen Inventions in one go), for the third time I make it more like a live performance and invite Ludger and Gerd to sit in the hall. That almost always makes me play better.

It had been agreed that I would hand over the finished master of this recording to a small Swiss label for production and distribution. When I was about to do so, something made me stop. I sensed it wasn’t the right thing to do. It was still my own property, so I contacted all the major labels to ask if they wanted it. None did. One maintained that Bach on the piano simply wasn’t marketable in those days of the ‘authentic’ instrument craze. Another said they were already committed to another pianist in that repertoire (I never figured out who that was). Yet another didn’t reply. Then I thought of Hyperion. I had written to Ted Perry several years before, but Tatiana Nikolayeva had already done The Art of the Fugue and the Goldberg Variations for them, and there was no space for another Bach pianist. Sometimes timing is everything: Nikolayeva had died only a few months before, so I thought I would try my luck again. It took Ted less than ten minutes to respond to the fax I wrote him.

It was good of Ted to let me keep my team in Germany. He knew I was happy with them and accepted not to change that, even though it would cost him more. We immediately planned the next release for the following year—a double-CD with all the French Suites, eighteen Little Preludes, the D minor Sonata and A minor Prelude and Fugue. I purposely started with those ‘easier’ pieces (though nothing is easy in Bach—I remember performing the Little Preludes in concert and never was I so nervous in my life), because I knew I couldn’t ever approach The Well-Tempered Clavier seriously without first having a very thorough grounding in the dance movements of the suites. For all of the Bach recordings (with the exception of the Goldberg Variations) it always was a mixture of pieces I had played before—some since I was very young—and others that were completely new. That is why I made a point of performing just about everything in the cycle first in public at least once if not many times before recording (and from memory).

My first recording of the Six Partitas (1996/7) was a big step for me. I had previously played only the first and fifth while in my teens. I took my time over it, studying them intensely. I couldn’t begin to count the hours I put into each of these recordings. It meant giving up a lot of other things in my life and my career—chamber music for one (though I have done huge amounts of that at my Trasimeno Music Festival in Umbria over the past twenty years). I also remember meeting Trevor Pinnock on a flight from Ottawa to London during these years, and he said he wanted to get back to playing more Bach on the harpsichord but that it required such an enormous amount of time and commitment. I couldn’t have agreed more.

For the second disc of the Partitas I made a change in my recording team. My producer, Otto Ernst Wohlert, retired and Ludger Böckenhoff took over, doing both sound engineering and producing. Ludger had been trained at the famous Tonmeister Institute in Detmold, and apart from all the technical studies, there was a great emphasis on the musical aspects of recording. I found myself being told that my trills weren’t precise enough, that I could bring out the different voices more clearly, that I was rushing, that yes, something was very good, but perhaps it could be better. He would even scold me for the occasional clicking of my fingernails, and was unerring at hearing extraneous technical noises, whether from the piano’s action or in the actual recording. We always had a great mutual respect for each other, and the Bach cycle (as well as all the other recordings we have done for Hyperion) has seen us grow together in knowledge and experience. To this day Ludger has always kept abreast of the advances in digital technology. We always do the editing together in his studio in Detmold. Normally an already finished first edit is sent to the musician for his or her comments before another one is done. That whole process can take ages with constant back and forth. We get through an entire CD in just a few days, and along the way make important artistic decisions. What I love about working with him is that I never walk out of the studio wondering if we have everything the way I wanted it. I always know we do. That is a great feeling.

In 1997, people were already planning concerts for the Bach anniversary year in 2000. Everyone was asking me when I would approach The Well-Tempered Clavier. Now that I had learned so much about rhythmic alterations in Baroque music (not playing exactly what is written in the score), articulation and especially the marked characteristics of each dance movement, I decided to plunge in. Over the next two years, I tackled twelve Preludes and Fugues every six months or so—always performing them in public and working hours on end to memorize them. It turned out to be the biggest challenge of my life. For sure I spent more hours with Bach than any living person during those years. We considered changing pianos and recording venues, but I was comfortable on the ‘Kempff’ Steinway, despite its slightly nasal tone. It inspired me. I still felt there was great life in its action and it wasn’t difficult to play. We did change the position of the piano in the Beethovensaal, however, removing a large portion of the seats and bringing it down off the stage to somewhere in the centre. I’m sure the holes we drilled in the floor to make sure we put it in the same place during those two years are still there!

The editing of the 48 Preludes and Fugues was a lesson in itself. The slightest difference in tempo or phrasing meant that two versions often could not be put together. And with voices tied over and musical phrases having to make sense, this took a great deal of concentration and musical intelligence. It was unbelievably tiring work, but also immensely satisfying. When I gave my first complete live performances of The Well-Tempered Clavier during the 1999–2000 season, I knew I was well prepared.

The next CD had to be the Goldberg Variations. I had learned them for the International Bach Competition of Washington D.C. when I was sixteen years old, and had already performed them for a quarter of a century. It was one of my warhorses, yet to record it was something else entirely. Putting down on tape a work of such monumental proportions would be a huge statement, and of course everyone would compare it to the two recordings of the piece by my compatriot Glenn Gould. I really didn’t care about that—I just wanted to do my very best. Previously in concert I had never done all of the repeats, so that was one thing to change as I felt it wouldn’t be taken seriously otherwise (although Gould never did). Working up to the recording, I saw how that opened up so many more possibilities for interpretation—doing things slightly differently the second time round. It almost became another piece.

The ageing Steinway in Hannover simply didn’t seem up to the task, so we made a change of instrument and venue. A few years before, Ludger and I had made a brief tour of possible recording venues in England and had visited Henry Wood Hall in London—a former church which is now a rehearsal hall for the major London orchestras as well as a superb recording facility. We used a Steinway that Gerd Finkenstein had in his own collection which was, and I believe still is, a beautiful piano. The only problem was getting it to England. Gerd fortunately loves to drive, so he simply put it in a trailer, hitched it on to his car, and off he went, getting the ferry across the English Channel. I think I even went down to Dover the first time he came over, and he followed me and a friend in his car so he wouldn’t get lost trying to navigate south London, let alone confused driving on the left side of the road for the first time! Ted Perry had generously given me five days for the sessions. I am forever grateful to him for that. Otherwise what subsequently happened might never have happened at all.

On the first day, after setting up and finding a sound we liked, I played a complete version—eighty minutes without stopping. Ludger and I (and Ted, I think, as he came along to visit us) listened to it all, marking in the score what we liked and disliked, what needed to be re-thought—so many things. For the next three days, we covered ten variations a day, having it all ‘in the can’ by the early evening of day four. For a break we went up to Oxford Street and had a Japanese meal, and I had a quick massage with my therapist nearby. Around 9 or 10 p.m. we returned to Henry Wood Hall. Gerd had done something to the action of the piano to make it even more responsive, and Ludger encouraged me to play the opening Aria once more. Nothing is more important than the beginning. So I did. It was good. ‘Keep going’, he said. ‘But it’s 11:15 at night—surely they’ll kick us out of here!’ I said. ‘No they won’t.’ So between then and 12:45 a.m. I gave the performance of my life of the Goldberg Variations (at least up until then!). I only stopped at the half-way point (after Variation 15) to whisper: ‘Do we have enough tape?’ (While listening in Ludger’s studio to the master CD of the Goldberg Variations that was to be sent to Hyperion, we both suddenly jumped at this point. By some fluke, my whispering that phrase could be heard during the pause between Variations 15 and 16! Of course we took it out immediately, but I still have the one CD with it left in.) I played for an audience of three: Ludger and Gerd, lying on the floor in the hall, and Gerd’s then wife, somewhere up in the balcony, stretched out on a pew. My body felt good; my interpretation felt liberated from all constraints; and my joy at the end was unbounded. I’ll never forget the feeling I had playing the final variation—that wonderful Quodlibet. To this day I try to recapture that every time I perform it. When I finished, we all knew we had something very special.

The only problem was that it was so different from what I had done on the previous days that we really couldn’t use any of that material for the inevitable patches. So on the fifth day we re-did whatever we thought might need covering. Still, something like 80% of the final recording comes from that one late-night performance.

I think it was after this recording that I decided to go back to Germany with Ludger, Gerd, his wife and the piano—making the cross-Channel trip on the boat, and then driving for hours in the stifling heat at the other end. We only did that once; never again. But it nevertheless remains a fun memory.

After recording the Italian Concerto, French Overture, and Capriccios in 2000, Ted Perry asked me if I would do an album of Bach Arrangements. As some of my favourite encores were exactly that (Mary Howe’s ‘Sheep may safely graze’ and Dame Myra Hess’s ‘Jesu, joy of man’s desiring’), I readily accepted. That recording, one of my favourites in all my discography, was dedicated to my organist father, Godfrey Hewitt, and he chose the three Bach organ chorale preludes that I arranged myself. It also contains several gems from A Bach Book for Harriet Cohen, a 1932 publication that I had discovered on a friend’s piano in London. Topping it off are wonderful arrangements by Wilhelm Kempff and Eugen d’Albert (the great C minor Passacaglia which I had heard my father play since I was a little girl). So many people have told me over the years that they’ve used tracks from that album at their loved one’s funeral, and how much comfort it has brought to them.

The year 2002 gave birth to the Toccatas recording, which was a lot of work but worth every minute. Such terrific pieces! The English Suites appeared in 2002/3; and what we thought at the time would be a final ‘mopping up’ disc of miscellaneous works in 2004. Our days spent in Henry Wood Hall were made even more enjoyable by the catering supplied by the staff. I was never good at concentrating when hungry, and as soon as I started making mistakes, we all knew it was time to stop for lunch. Full three-course meals were on offer, and my dietary needs (no wheat) were strictly adhered to. I stayed away from the rich desserts (the English trifle was the favourite of the boys) which would slightly dull the senses of my team for about an hour afterwards. Interruptions were not many (which was amazing for central London). I can remember only a few occasions when the rain on the roof was so loud we really couldn’t go on, or else days when the typical English weather of sun one minute and clouds the next would result in the roof creaking. And once some computer glitch meant we had to completely redo the Sixth English Suite. I always respond to pressure, though, and the resulting performance was better than what we would have had without the technical intervention. I remember Ludger telling me to give a ‘hair-down’ performance of that final Gigue, so I really went for it. He was always great at knowing when I could go even further and risk more. Often I would surprise him, though, and do it without prodding. He would be about to declare a piece finished when I wanted to do it one last time. Occasionally that worked for the better.

By 2004, just over ten years after the first recording, we had got through all of the major solo keyboard works of Bach. What a journey! It had given shape to my life and my career in a way that nothing else could have done.

But … there was to be more!
In 2003 I had done a tour of Australia with the Australian Chamber Orchestra and they had completely won me over with their musicality, precision, and imagination. I had been looking for a while for an orchestra with whom to record all the Bach Keyboard Concertos and finally I found them! In February 2005, in the days when record labels had the budget to do such things, I and my recording team went off to Sydney, Australia, to record nine Bach Concertos. Those were busy but happy sessions in the Verbrugghen Hall of the Sydney Conservatorium, working with the orchestra and their brilliant leader Richard Tognetti. Not once did their energy flag, nor their imaginations stop soaring. A few trips to the beach (it was summer there) helped to keep us going. We had sent the piano tuner, Gerd Finkenstein, out a few days early to work on the one Fazioli available at the time. I had played it in recital in the 2000-seat Sydney Town Hall in 1995 (my first experience playing a Fazioli piano ever) and found it a terrific instrument, but since then it had fallen into disuse. Gerd whipped it into shape, and off we went, including in our recording the Fifth Brandenburg Concerto, and the virtuoso Triple Concerto in A minor.

I continued to have many requests to perform The Well-Tempered Clavier around the world. Not being a piece that one can play at the drop of a hat (after all it is four and a half hours of the most difficult music to memorize and play), I decided to devote my entire 2007/8 season to what was called my Bach World Tour. From South Africa to South America, Sydney to Shanghai, Los Angeles to Ottawa, Glasgow to Warsaw … I performed the entire cycle in twenty-six countries on six continents over a period of fourteen months. For the occasion, Hyperion re-released my 1997/8 recording of it as a special boxed set. Even before the tour started, however, I knew I wanted to record it again. One of the things I’m most proud of is convincing Simon Perry (Ted’s son, who took over the management of Hyperion after Ted’s death in 2003) to allow me to do so. It took some persuading. At first we thought a live recording would be best, but logistically that was a nightmare. In the end, one month before the end of the tour, I gathered with my team in the Jesus-Christus-Kirche in Berlin. We did the whole thing (4 CDs) in seven days—listening and all. It is this version of The Well-Tempered Clavier that is included on CDs 19–22 in this boxed set. The huge amount of experience and sheer time I had spent with the work during my world tour meant that large parts of it came without editing. Still, when those microphones are so close, attention has to be paid to every detail. The acoustics were inspiring, and I was playing my own gleaming Fazioli concert grand, brought from my home in Umbria. I remember bursting into tears at the end of the B minor Fugue concluding Book 1—an immense arc of great intensity—which I played only once. That alone showed me that all the long hours spent with Bach had been worth it.

There was, however, one thing that was nagging me. I can’t tell you how many emails and letters I received from people around the world asking me if I was ever going to record The Art of Fugue. My first thought was no, never! What I had heard of it never seemed to excite me very much, though neither could I believe that Bach in his final years had at last managed to write something boring. I didn’t really consider it a keyboard work—and in fact it was written in open score, not on two staves but four. Those were all excuses for something which eventually I knew I would have to do.

It took an invitation from London’s Royal Festival Hall to give me the impetus to start. They wanted two recitals in the 2012/13 season, seven months apart. In each recital I put half of The Art of Fugue, pairing it with a late Beethoven Sonata (Op 101 and Op 110).

When I began studying it in early 2012, I was recovering from a major operation so had empty days with many hours to fill. I needed that. The work was meticulous: singing every voice, marking in the articulation, the phrasing, the breathing points in each voice, the fingering taking all that into account. The more thorough you are at the beginning of learning a piece by Bach, the better the results. Most people don’t have that sort of patience. They want to play it right off. You can do that, of course, but then you don’t get the separation of the voices in the right way. It was good to approach it with so many years of Bach-playing behind me. The Goldberg Variations and much of The Well-Tempered Clavier seem like child’s play in comparison. In The Art of Fugue there are no Preludes for comic relief—just one fugal masterpiece after the other. Its severity can be daunting, but also completely overwhelming, both intellectually and emotionally. And now I realize it is anything but boring.

My first complete public performance of it was at my Trasimeno Music Festival in Umbria, Italy, in July of 2013. I remember playing it in a flowing Roberto Cavalli dress in the fifteenth-century courtyard of the Castle of the Knights of Malta in Magione. In August of that year, I recorded it in Berlin’s Jesus-Christus-Kirche, and for the first time I used my own Fazioli F278 concert grand (with four pedals) for a solo Bach recording (having used it a few years previously in the same church when I recorded all of Bach’s Flute Sonatas with Andrea Oliva). So much of The Art of Fugue is a conversation between Bach and God his maker, and playing it, especially late at night, in that beautiful-sounding space was incredibly inspiring.

Any performer of The Art of Fugue has to take a decision what to do when the music stops abruptly in the middle of Contrapunctus 14. I thought long and hard about this, but in the end the obvious and most moving thing to do seemed to me to hold a long silence when the music trails off (which in live performance comes as a total shock and makes everybody hold their breath), and then to let enter the chorale prelude that his son, C P E Bach, included on the final page of the first edition. Vor deinen Thron tret ich hiermit, BWV668a, is known as the ‘Deathbed’ Chorale as legend has it that Bach dictated it in his final moments. Regardless of whether this is true or not, this music speaks for itself. Devices found in The Art of Fugue (diminution, inversion, stretto) are used with the utmost simplicity to produce a profound piece of music. The key is G major—the same tonality Bach used when writing the chorale prelude Alle Menschen müssen sterben (‘All men must die’). It creates an almost unbearably poignant ending. The composer who, perhaps more than anyone, wrote music that offers us solace in times of trouble was now facing his own end. He did so with the greatest strength, total acceptance, and even joy. Only in the final two bars do we hear a hint of sadness. There could be no ending more fitting than this.

Through all these years I of course continued to perform the Goldberg Variations: perhaps no work in the keyboard repertoire means more to me. It has accompanied me to major festivals around the world, most memorably to my late-night Edinburgh Festival debut in 2002. Ian McEwan was in the audience that packed the Usher Hall, and three years later my ‘interpretation’ of it turned up in his novel Saturday. The evening in 2012 when Hurricane Sandy was approaching a deserted New York City, I was performing it at ‘Le Poisson Rouge’—a hip, underground venue in Greenwich Village where people are allowed to eat during the concert. They didn’t, but instead were absolutely still. In Toronto at the 2014 Luminato Festival, I performed it on an outdoor stage while a group of young urban dancers did fantastic improvisations that bowled me over with their instinctive feel. They had no previous experience of Bach, let alone the ‘Goldbergs’, and their immediate, positive response to the music was a joy to behold.

Other particularly memorable performances of the ‘Goldbergs’ have been in places as diverse as Orchestra Hall, Chicago (where the last man waiting for a signed CD afterwards said he had no idea what was on sale but thought it must be something worthwhile seeing the line-up that went out the shop and around the block!); the rapt audience sitting on hard benches in London’s Wanamaker Playhouse at Shakespeare’s Globe, lit only by candles; and in a living room in south-west London for an audience of four, which was perhaps the most moving of all. If legend is true, then it was meant to be played in such a space. Still after all those years, I could look forward to presenting it for my solo debuts in Vienna and Madrid in 2017, and in July 2018 for a special birthday celebration at Wigmore Hall. One never tires of the joy that results in sharing it with audiences around the world.

The best moments in a performer’s life come when a piece is so much a part of you that you can forget the mechanics of it and find total freedom. In the new recording (CD25 in this box), made sixteen years after my first of the ‘Goldbergs’ for Hyperion, perhaps the most important thing to me was the flow of the music. When it came time to listen to the first edit (still during the days of the recording sessions), I couldn’t sit down to listen. I had to stand up, constantly moving to the music, dancing, conducting it, singing it; only being still during the emotionally draining Variation 25 (which, as with the Aria da capo, is presented here with no edits from the first take, a complete run-through of the whole work). A few tempos didn’t quite have the ease I was looking for, so I changed them in the final session. This recording is therefore not a patchwork of thirty-two different tracks, but one complete vision.

The goalposts that I feel along the way have remained the same over the years. The first twelve variations seem fairly rooted to earth, and establish the pattern of groups of three. But with the tenderness of Variation 13, every­thing is lifted to another level. The first minor variation, No 15, is a turning point, leading us into the second half. When I begin No 22, after the second minor variation, I see my way to the end. With No 26 I am on the home stretch. The wonder that is Bach’s imagination, able to conjure up thirty diverse variations on the same harmonic outline, leaves us in awe when he returns to the Aria at the end. After that simple, divine moment, there is nothing more to say.

I leave it up to the listener to hear the differences (and similarities, of course) between the two recordings. That is part of the fun. The different make of piano certainly plays a part. The Steinway I recorded on back in 1999 was a most beautiful instrument. My own Fazioli on this 2015 recording is more flexible, more challenging to one’s creativity, more open to variations in sound and touch. The emphasis on dance is more marked (dance in Bach means joy—one would think that with age the capacity for joy diminishes, but in fact I find the opposite). On this new recording the phrasing is, I think, more elastic; the touch, when required, lighter; the contrasts more apparent. But above all, the Goldberg Variations has somehow become a mirror of my life, and gives me the opportunity to say with music that which I would never be able to express with words. If I recorded it again now, it would be different again still.

In 2016 I embarked on my ‘Bach Odyssey’—a worldwide tour of the complete works of Bach in 12 recitals. The Covid pandemic played havoc with the final year which was to have been 2020 but ended up being 2022 (with several performances being done as videos with no audience or else strict social distancing). The Six Partitas I performed in 2018, once more marvelling at their inventiveness, range of expression, and sheer brilliance—not just in technique but also in perfection of form. No wonder these suites have stood the test of time and are among the most frequently played of his keyboard compositions.

Listening to my first Hyperion recording of them from more than 20 years previously, I knew I wanted to record them again, this time on my own Fazioli and in the warm acoustics of the Kulturzentrum Gustav Mahler in Toblach/Dobbiaco. I was happy when Simon Perry said ‘Yes, OK!’ I don’t think many record labels would have given me that chance. One memory especially stands out: after playing through the magnificent Partita No 6 in E minor, my producer Ludger Böckenhoff said to me, ‘Do people realize what you’re playing when they hear this music?’ It’s a keyboard work of course, but one of such deep religious fervour and profundity that is impossible to describe in words. We felt that on the day we recorded it, and I’ve never forgotten it.

So what was different second time round? Well, you’ll have to listen to find out! Don’t expect huge differences of Gouldian proportions. An allemande is still an allemande; a French courante should still not be rushed; a gigue must remain danceable. Twenty years of life have intervened—twenty years spent practising his music, always trying to do better, to bring it to life even more. The older we get, the more music means to us, and it gives me great joy to share these partitas with you once again.

Will that be it? Who knows? My performance of Bach’s Goldberg Variations in the Thomas-Kirche in Leipzig, filmed by ARTE Television in 2020 when I was presented with the City of Leipzig Bach Medal (again to no audience, thanks to the pandemic, but relayed live to the entire world via the internet) was one of the most moving of my life. Bach was lying there under the floor next to me: I knew if ever I played the ‘Goldbergs’ well, it had to be right then. I did it. That performance was the first on my ‘new’ Fazioli F278 that replaced the one you hear in these recordings that came to an unfortunate end in the Jesus-Christus-Kirche in Berlin in January of 2020 (thus the second Partitas recording was my last Bach recording made on it).

Recording techniques have developed in a way we never imagined during the thirty years I have worked with Ludger. When we started it was with DAT tape. Then tape dis­appeared altogether. A few CDs appeared in SACD (the Bach Concertos, for instance), but that was short-lived. Now Dolby Atmos is the thing. Our relationship has been one in which we have both grown tremendously, and we have kept each other on our toes. For this I am hugely grateful.

In the end, all of these recordings capture a moment in time: how I played each of these pieces on a certain day in a certain year. What was important to me was that after every recording session, when the microphones were taken down and the piano was loaded back into the van, I felt I had done the best I could do. The fact that this boxed set is also a document of my own personal growth as a pianist and person only adds, I hope, to your overall enjoyment.

My thanks go to the tremendous vision of Hyperion Records, to the late Ted Perry and his son Simon Perry for believing in me from the start, and to all their staff for their support throughout this huge project from 1994 to 2018. My life has been shaped by these Bach recordings, and to all of you who have listened to them over so many years, I say a huge thank you!

Angela Hewitt © 2026