Hewitt is a thinking musician, and her ventures into Romanticism are—what else?—eminently thoughtful. In the sonata, Faust, Gretchen, and Mephistopheles have been banished to the Faust Symphony and the Mephisto Waltzes to make way for a ladylike exercise in 'pure' music. Where everyone from Horowitz to Hough evinces lift, tension, electricity, trajectory from the sonata’s opening bars, Hewitt is ruminative, cautious, finicky. What’s missing is not Fingerfertigkeit or muscularity—between stentorian salvos she ripples off filigree with flair—but imagination, fantasy, grandeur. Readings of the sonata generally time in somewhere between 30 and 32 minutes: Hewitt’s runs 34:23, which introduces more than a dab of aural flab, compounded by occasional uncalled for rubato, without expressive gain. When Liszt wants rubato, he asks for it. From her recent unidiomatic forays into Chabrier and Fauré, rhythmic steadiness has proven difficult for Hewitt. Or, perhaps she’s merely self-indulgent. Despite feints toward the grand gesture, compelling voltage just isn’t there. Likewise, her tiptoeing through the Petrarch Sonnets leaves an impression less impassioned than genteel, a gentility muting the sulphurous sweep of the Dante Sonata, as if explaining Hell for the tender sensibilities of a Sunday school class. In the upshot, her feeling for Liszt—in pacing, dynamics, and detail—is picayune. Her Fazioli is taken in large hall ambience, albeit amply filled at climactic moments.

Fanfare, USA