After his last recital at Chicago’s Symphony Center in February this year (sadly, I was too busy with my day job to contribute a blog entry), Paul Lewis was berated by a woman at the post-concert reception for not playing an encore. He had finished his recital with Schubert’s D-major Sonata, D850, a work that starts full of youthful vigor and confidence but whose last movement has an enchanting child-like innocence. I don’t think there is any Freudian subtext here. This isn’t some kind of psychological regression caused by an earlier crisis, at least judging by the earlier movements; it seems more like a child’s view of heaven, a kind of pre-echo of the last movement of Mahler’s 4th Symphony. Lewis tried to explain that no encore could follow such sublime simplicity but his critic was not convinced. He took the scolding with good humor, but I think managed to avoid giving an unequivocal promise to rectify things the next time. And he didn’t. Yesterday, he returned for another all-Schubert recital but, fortunately for him, there was no reception following the concert this time, so he didn’t have to face the music after failing in his assigned duties once again.
Paul Lewis has a holistic view of recitals, a belief in the oneness of music (which may be why he wears a black shirt with a Mandarin collar, giving him the air of a Zen master). Pianists are often asked how they planned a concert program, and some are more convincing than others in coming up with an explanation. However, Lewis doesn’t just connect pieces in the abstract; he bonds them together. A couple of years ago, he slyly started Mozart’s Rondo in A-minor before anyone realized that the preceding Ligeti had finished, giving the chromaticism of the opening melody a distinctly modern twist. To achieve his goal, he has to trick the audience by hovering expectantly over the keyboard once a piece has ended, confusing us into silence. Yesterday, he contrived to link Schubert’s Hungarian Rondo to his G-major Sonata, D894, this way, although it might be easier if he just told us to hold the applause. At least, everyone would know what was going on.
This desire to turn recitals into a unified artistic experience, a meaningful event, could be pretentious and egotistical if it weren’t for the fact that Lewis’ playing is so extraordinarily beautiful. Nobody else this season in Chicago has made the piano sing with such luminous tone, shaped phrases with such haunting subtlety, or shaded the accompaniments with such precisely varied colors. He plays everything with complete authority, knowing exactly what he wants to say and being able to express it with total technical command. On paper, this program did not require a particularly strong technique, but true virtuosity is not just about speed and power and this was virtuoso playing of the highest order.
I expect that Lewis is fed up with being hailed as the new ‘Alfred Brendel’ but I think that, like Imogen Cooper before him, he has absorbed a certain aesthetic sensibility from his former teacher that is now fused with his own musical personality (although if he does get irritated with the comparison, he should stop adopting some of Brendel’s quirks, such as a snatching his hands away from the keyboard as if he had touched a red-hot poker). In the mid-seventies, I attended a series of master-classes that Brendel gave on London’s South Bank that were nothing short of revelatory, and have had a profound effect on my whole approach to music and the piano ever since. In hearing the way Lewis maintains tension throughout a musical line, uses the pedal to shape phrases, or varies the color of inner voices within chords, I hear clear echoes of what Brendel conveyed in those classes. On the other hand, I don’t mean to suggest that Lewis’ playing is derivative. I think he often plays with greater rhythmic freedom and suppleness than Brendel, and his phrasing is a little less sculpted and more natural, but there is definitely a family resemblance.
After some of Schubert’s youthful waltzes, Lewis played his first set of Impromptus, D899. I sometimes have a rather jaded response to these pieces, partly because they are so often performed and partly because they can sound rather plain if not played with the greatest subtlety. You also need a superb piano, because the pianistic textures can sound rather congested if the left-hand accompaniments are not as expertly controlled as they were here. The streaming triplets in the second movement are not as difficult as they sound, but they were rewarded by an eruption of applause anyway (rather ironic, I suppose), before the famous G-flat major Impromptu brought out Lewis’ best cantabile playing. The final movement is equally famous, but has rarely sparkled as brightly as in this performance.
The real highlight of the afternoon was the great G-major sonata. This is perhaps one of Schubert’s most serene works. He can never completely suppress the demons lurking below the surface; there are a couple of temperamental outbursts in the slow movement, and the first movement’s development section builds to an anguished climax, but the overall mood is one of profound repose. I have mixed feelings about repeats on some of Schubert’s longer movements, which can seem dangerously over-extended, but Lewis’ playing of the opening chords was so gentle and transfixingly beautiful that I was grateful when he started the exposition all over again. In this music more than any other, Schubert seems to suspend time completely, without being the least soporific, ending the movement in contented tranquility.
The slow movement is one of Schubert’s most lyrical, without the infinite sadness of his last sonatas, but with an achingly poignant modulation towards the end. For some reason, Schubert often saved some of his most intimate music for the trio sections of his scherzi, and this sonata has a particularly beautiful example, played with exquisitely hushed pianissimos by Lewis. Brendel would allow himself to smile gently in these passages, his mouth trembling as if to let us know that he was sharing an especially precious confidence with us, but Lewis was wise to look more conventionally expressive; I don’t suppose his lips are given much to quivering anyway. He finished his recital playfully, dispatching the finale with relaxed affection and warmth.
Some have criticized Paul Lewis’ playing as over-controlled and lacking in spontaneity – that is always the flip-side of having a clear vision of the music – but I think, as he has matured, he has also loosened up a little and, to my ears, his playing now has great naturalness as well as sensitivity. As I walked down the stairs after the concert, the last movement still dancing in my ears, I realized how grateful I was that he had ignored the insatiable demand for encores. They really would have disrupted my moment of Zen.
Thanks, as ever, for the insightful and gracious writing. Off now to find my recording of Brendel playing the Impromptus…