Ravel built Le Tombeau de Couperin around Baroque suite forms — an explicit homage to the seventeenth-century keyboard tradition, filtered through early-twentieth-century French harmony. On August 16, Angela Hewitt performs that work alongside actual keyboard compositions by Couperin at Maverick Concert Hall in Woodstock.
About the Show
The program brings together Bach’s Partita No. 5 in G major, Schumann’s Piano Sonata No. 2 in G minor, Couperin keyboard selections, and Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin. Placing Couperin’s own works alongside Ravel’s tribute to that tradition gives the afternoon a particular reflective quality — the source and the homage in the same room. Hewitt is well-placed for this program. She won the 1985 Toronto International Bach Piano Competition, held in memory of Glenn Gould, and her Hyperion cycle of Bach’s major keyboard works (recorded from 1994 through 2014) was described by The Sunday Times as “one of the record glories of our age.” Her recorded catalogue extends to Couperin, Ravel, Schumann, Chopin, Debussy, and Messiaen, among others; she has also commissioned contemporary works from composers worldwide and conducts concertos from the keyboard with major orchestras internationally. She has won four Juno Awards, was inducted into Gramophone Magazine’s Hall of Fame in 2015, received an OBE in 2006, was named a Companion of the Order of Canada in 2015, and in 2020 received both the City of Leipzig Bach Medal and the Wigmore Hall Gold Medal. Hewitt is also founder and artistic director of the Trasimeno Music Festival in Umbria, Italy, which she established in 2005. This concert is part of the Maverick Chamber Music Festival’s 2026 season, which runs through September 13 and centers on American composers and the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence; Hewitt’s program of Bach, Couperin, Schumann, and Ravel is the season’s European counterpart to that theme.
Venue & Logistics
Maverick Concert Hall is a hand-built wooden pavilion from 1916, set in West Hurley near Woodstock in the Hudson Valley. The open-air structure holds 400. For a pianist who performs at the Bregenz Festival (August 7–8) and the Hollywood Bowl (August 11) before arriving here, the scale is a deliberate choice, not a concession. The concert runs 4:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m.
Tickets
Reserved hall seats are $75 and $40; partial-obstruction seating is $30 and $27; general admission outdoors is $25; student tickets are $10. Buy tickets