Feisty Bette Davis was memorably photographed by Roddy McDowall in 1981, holding a cushion inscribed, "Old Age Ain't No Place for Sissies".
In music, Bach's The Art of Fugue holds similar terrors for the unwary pianist. Unfinished at the composer's death, this work is a contrapuntal Matterhorn, a collection offugues and canons intricately woven from the same minimal theme.
Half a century ago, American writer Henry Pleasants provocatively suggested Bach would have chuckled at this cerebral composition being performed. Yet artists from the Emerson String Quartet and the viol consort Fretwork through to pianists Joanna MacGregor and Pierre-Laurent Aimard have proved that this score does, indeed, have a live beating heart.
Angela Hewitt is the latest pianist to take on this challenge, in a new Hyperion double CD. One of today's finest Bach interpreters, Hewitt primed us for it in 2012, writing in The Guardian, and we felt every painstaking step in her preparation. "Each voice must sing," as she put it. "And one voice often takes a breath in a different place from another."
These Herculean labours eventually were rewarded by triumphant performances and this recording. Hewitt lays out a vast range of moods and emotions over 21 tracks. From the start, she is quick to unearth the dance at the core of the second fugue; the final four-part piece, repeated in an inverted mirror version, is a joyous, fleet-fingered gigue.
Thanks to supple phrasing and subtle rubato, the more reflective movements come across as curiously Schumannesque; and when the chromatics become gnarly, we are in early Schoenberg territory.
Schumann admitted that Bach's complexity here sometimes made his eyes smart, yet the great Romantic was deeply moved by Bach's final, unfinished fugue, "as if the ever-creating giant had died while writing these pages".
Hewitt leaves Bach's last piece where it trailed off; hints of modulations and tonal journeys to come are especially poignant.
She completes the recording with Bach's arrangement of a chorale, Before your throne I now appear. It proves to be the perfect summation, both contrapuntally and spiritually, of an immensely rewarding journey.
Verdict: "A voyage to discover the heart and soul of a contrapuntal colossus"
