The Canadian pianist Angela Hewitt returned to Meany Hall on Tuesday for a well-chosen evening of Bach, Beethoven, Fauré, and Ravel before a sizable and appreciative audience.

Hewitt currently dominates an unfortunately shrinking repertoire niche: music of the high Baroque played on the modern piano. Not only has she devoted herself to the music of J. S. Bach (including spending the entire concert season of 2007-8 on a worldwide tour of the Well-Tempered Clavier), but she has recorded discs of François Couperin and Rameau. While Bach’s music is powerfully abstract as well as visceral and therefore sounds fine when well played on anything, Couperin is something different: a composer who would seem to be completely wedded to the sound and touch of the French harpsichord. Yet Hewitt has garnered considerable acclaim for all her Baroque recordings and performances.

The opening work on the concert was Bach’s D minor English Suite. What was Hewitt’s Bach like? The most important aspect for me was a superb sense of timing. Agogics are always supreme in Baroque playing and Hewitt shaped the rise and fall of the uneven phrase lengths with great subtlety, even in polyphony. There were some delicate and lovely sounds in the more homophonic pieces, most notably in the Sarabande. Pedaling was sparse and unobtrusive and tempi well-judged. All repeats were played and slightly ornamented. The tendency to begin repeats at a low dynamic level was predictable enough to become a mannerism.

She was not doctrinaire about trills: some started from the top but several began with the principal note. There was some unsteadiness in the Courante (a French-style Courante needs an inexorable pulse if its cross-rhythms are to be clarified) and the closing Gigue. More troubling was the harsh, shallow sound in the louder passages, a problem which plagued the whole evening.

Looking at Hewitt’s website Thursday about this Tuesday concert gave some insight into this. I know that she prefers to play Fazioli pianos and this was not what she used. Here is what she says:

“Unfortunately, the closest Fazioli dealer is in Salt Lake City so it wasn’t possible to have one. The piano I played (one of those beginning with S that seems to be everywhere) was very powerful, but had terrible clicking noises they said couldn’t be fixed.....I was told by the tuner that a lot of pianists don’t notice it. Well, so much for a lot of pianists!...the audience would never have known that something was doing its best to distract me.”

The "S piano" also was a bit out of tune in the first half. Oddly, for her 2005 Meany recital, Hewitt did use a Fazioli (from Salt Lake City). One reviewer mentioned that it went badly out of tune in the second half. Hewitt must feel that Seattle is a land without pianos. In any case, her discomfort probably explains the rather restricted tonal palette she produced.

The first half ended with Beethoven F Major sonata, Opus 10 #2, one of his wittiest and most concise works. It doesn’t get played often enough, pianists delving into Op. 10 usually preferring the more dramatic C minor or the brilliant D Major. This was the best playing of the night, despite some rushing in the finale. Hewitt played both repeats in the outer movements, enabling us to fully savor the tonal fluctuations in the first Allegro (false recap in D) and the waddling, comical quasi-fugal Presto. The somber minuet that serves as the middle movement was appropriately hushed.

The second half the program contained two of Fauré’s Valse-Caprices (numbers 1 and 2) and Ravel’s familiar Le Tombeau de Couperin (also played by Hewitt here in 2005). There were moments of poetic sensitivity, such as the fugue of the Ravel and the second Fauré waltz, but for music that depends so much on variety of sound the overall effect was a bit pallid. I have considerable admiration and respect for Hewitt, her taste and her musicianship, and while these are positive terms they are not the highest of praise. Something about her playing continues to elude me: I am rarely moved or excited by it. I will, however, keep trying.