There are a handful of performers you sit down and listen to in concert and you come away thinking, how can that be improved upon? Canadian pianist Angela Hewitt is one of that rare breed, and her regular appearances in Australia over the past two decades or more have built her a substantial fanbase.

So the news that Chris Howlett, the Melbourne-based cellist and co-founder of the Australian Digital Concert Hall, had booked her for a four-concert tour in Melbourne, Adelaide, Bendigo and Sydney – her first appearances here in seven years – was cause for celebration, reflected in the packed City Recital Hall auditorium at a time when promoters are finding it ever harder to sell seats.

Angela Hewitt.

Hewitt has recently completed recording a survey of WA Mozart’s piano sonatas and she chose for this concert one of only two of the 18 works written in a minor key. Sonata No. 14 in C minor, K475, was composed shortly after his mother died in 1778, and it was published alongside his Fantasia, also in C minor, and this piece made a dramatic curtain-raiser to the recital.

Both...