The Maverick audience doesn’t get to hear a lot of Baroque music, and most of the Baroque music we’re familiar with was composed closely before 1750, the generally-agreed-upon start of the Classical period and the year that saw the death — on the 28^th of July — of Johann Sebastian Bach. We were thus delighted, on July 27^th — one day before the 274^th anniversary of his death — to hear a program devoted entirely to Bach’s glorious keyboard music, performed — a day after her own 66^th birthday — by the brilliant British-Canadian pianist Angela Hewitt.

At this auspicious confluence of dates, Hewitt made music of the very highest order. We have heard performances of Bach’s music for solo violin and solo cello at the Maverick, but we were delighted on Saturday to experience some of Bach’s best-known works for keyboard alone.

Hewitt has recorded all the composer’s major keyboard works. The London Sunday Times termed the Hyperion series, “one of the record glories of our age.” At moments that evening, enraptured as we were in the Maverick’s rustic splendor, we felt unaccountably as if all of creation, along with the music, were safe in Hewitt’s hands. The evening built on gracious ripples in an antique pool of the most reverent and welcoming water. Those hours of Bach, performed without falter or blemish, made for a joyous business.

One of the world’s leading concert pianists, and one of the foremost J.S. Bach interpreters of our time, Angela Hewitt appears in recital and as soloist with major orchestras throughout Europe, the Americas, Australia, and Asia. She has won the City of Leipzig Bach Medal, the Wigmore Hall Gold Medal, and a Companion of the Order of Canada. In 2010 she commissioned seven composers from around the world to write short pieces inspired by Bach, which were published in a collection (along with several of her own Bach transcriptions) titled “Angela Hewitt’s Bach Book”.

She opened at Maverick with the Toccata in C Minor, BWV 911, a work of exquisite refinement perhaps less well known than the rest of what we heard. She followed the toccata with the Fifth French Suite, a work set in the key of G major, which for Baroque era musicians carried the nuanced meaning of contemplative holiness and benediction. Hewitt’s flawless execution bore us along on delicate sheets of sound and ecstatic ornamentation in all the right places. She dispatched the Gigue, especially, with a stunning combination of euphoria and precision.

Hewitt ended the concert’s first half with the well-known Italian Concerto, BWV 971. Her pristine joy evoked the Italian style, as if the musical business were being transacted on two keyboards, separate but equal and each with its own musical force and direction.

Bach set his Partita No. 6, the second half opener, in E minor, the relative minor of the French Suite in the first half, and it is almost twice as long. There is more variety as to tempo, more slow movements, and more expansive passages, all of which she dispatched with grace, honoring generously the many opportunities for rubato as well as unexpected but inevitable-sounding crescendi and decrescendi.

The sturdy Yamaha piano on the Maverick stage responded triumphantly to the demands of the supremely gifted artist. The upper notes of melody and arpeggiation spoke with clarity, and the bass rang out with the energy and heft of a carillon.

After the lengthy Partita, and a slightly longer-than-usual pause in the proceeding, Hewitt essayed the Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue, BWV 903. The torrents of sound held us spellbound, and the chromaticism and deliberation of the fugue did not set us free until it was all over. We were reminded of Dayenu, the passage from the Haggadah of Passover that thanks God for deliverance. If he had done only this one great deed, or that one, we read at the Seder, it would have been enough. Had Hewitt played only the Partita, or the Italian Concerto, it would have been enough. But here, there’s more! Angela Hewitt came to Woodstock and gave us the Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue. And it was enough….and never too much of a great thing.

Hewitt encored with a transcription of “Sheep May Safely Graze,” the serene and beloved aria from Bach’s Hunting Cantata.

Mary Fairchild lives in Rosendale, New York, after a long career as a host at WQXR, WNYC, WMHT (Schenectady), and WPLN (Nashville). For some 20 years Mary wrote program notes for Vladimir Feltsman’s PianoSummer at New Paltz. Before being called by Kalliope, the Muse of Eloquence and of Writing About Music, she worked as a financial editor and manager of investor relations in Wall Street.