It has to be a good thing when the Canadian pianist Angela Hewitt begins a recital with Bach: first because it reminds us how good at it she is, and second because the clarity and questing logic of her playing in this repertoire makes us listen out for similar qualities in the rest of her programme. On this occasion that consisted of music by two French keyboard masters, Couperin and Ravel.
Couperin completed his second book of Pièces de clavecin in 1717; Hewitt played the eight pieces that form the sixth suite. The first piece, Les Moissonneurs (The Reapers), was rather foursquare, but Les Langueurs-Tendres, with its less obvious sense of direction, brought back Hewitt's more searching playing. And there was wit in La Commère (The gossip), with its irritable, disruptive accents and impatient ending.
Ravel wasn't exactly sparing in the amount of notes he wrote, and the three pianistic poems that form his Gaspard de la Nuit brought very different challenges. Hewitt kept the thread of melody unbroken through the shimmering complexity of the first piece, Ondine, and her pinpointed touch was to the fore in Scarbo, with its fiendishly fast repeated notes and an ending that seemed to vanish into the ether. Le Tombeau de Couperin is a little less lush, Ravel evoking his predecessor as a paragon of French musicianship and basing the work's structure on the 18th-century idea of the suite form. Hewitt gave a staccato kick to the Forlane, reminding us that it is a dance movement. But it was her thoughtful playing of the Fugue that was the highlight, the initial theme sounding intriguingly unsure of where it might go next, the lines of melody independent yet tightly intertwined.
The Bach that launched the programme was the English Suite No 3. Hewitt may have begun by cascading down the keyboard with a flourish, but there was no self-indulgence to her playing as the mood of the pieces became darker and more striking. Paradoxically, Hewitt managed to combine a sense that the music could take a new direction any moment with a feeling that each corner turned was inevitably right. It is in this music - some of the most abstract and unembellished of her wide repertoire - that she seems most herself.
