BEETHOVEN # 1 Paul Lewis

Paul Lewis’s Beethoven sonata cycle shows him playing down all possible roughness and angularity in favour of a richly humane and predominantly lyrical beauty. Again, here is nothing of that glossy, impersonal sheen beloved of too many young pianists, but a subtly nuanced perception beneath an immaculate surface.

His technique, honed on many ultra-demanding areas of the repertoire, allows him an imaginative and poetic latitude only given to a musical elite. Telescoped phrasing, rapid scrambles for security, waywardness and pedantry he gladly leaves to others, firmly but gently guiding you to the very heart of the composer. His Appassionata is characterised by muted gunfire, as if the sonata’s warlike elements were heard from a distance. Yet the lucidity with which he views such violence easily makes others’ more rampant virtuosity become sound and fury, signifying little. His way, too, with the teasing toccata-like finales of Nos 12 and 22 is typical of his lyrical restraint, a far cry, indeed, from a more overt brilliance. How superbly he captures Beethoven’s over-the-shoulder glance at Haydn, his great predecessor, yet gives you all of his forward-looking Romanticism in the early F minor Sonata (No 1). Again, how many pianists could achieve such unfaltering poise and sensitivity in No 4’s Largo, con gran espressione?

Sometimes his warmth and flexibility suggest Beethoven seen, as it were, through Schubert’s eyes (the finale to Op 31 No 1), and he often suggests a darker, more serious side to the composer’s laughter and high jinks. But he plays Beethoven’s humorous afterthought at the close of the Op 31 No 1’s Allegro vivace as to the manner born and his presto coda to the finale becomes a joyous chase. His way with the Tempest Sonata is a reminder, too, of his outwardly relaxed mastery, quite without a sign of a skewed or telescoped phrase and with page after page given with a quiet but superbly focused intensity. His Adagio is gravely processional, his finale acutely yet subtly and unobtrusively characterised.

Even the composer’s relatively carefree or lightweight gestures are invested with a drama and significance that illuminate them in a novel but wholly natural light. Here is one of those rare pianists who can charge even a single note or momentary pause with drama and significance and convince you, for example, that his lyrical, often darkly introspective way with Beethoven’s pulsing con brio brilliance in the Waldstein Sonata is a viable, indeed, memorable alternative to convention.

So, too, is his way with the Hammerklavier, that most daunting of masterpieces, where he tells us that even when the composer is at his most elemental he remains deeply human and vulnerable. Not for him Schnabel’s headlong attempt to obey Beethoven’s wild first-movement metronome mark; nor does he view the vast spans of the Adagio as ‘like the icy heart of some remote mountain lake’ (JWN Sullivan) but rather a place of ineffable sadness. And here as elsewhere he is able to relish every detail of the composer’s ever-expanding argument while maintaining a flawless sense of line and continuity.

These performances are a transparent act of musical love and devotion. Nothing is exaggerated yet virtually everything is included. Of all the modern versions of the sonatas, Lewis’s is surely the most eloquent and persuasive. Harmonia Mundi’s sound is of demonstration quality.