Interview with the musician Paul Lewis

Being an English pianist must be a lonely calling at times. There is no native tradition like the ones that, say, German or Russian musicians are heir to, so many superb pianists have been unjustly overlooked. It used to be said of John Ogdon that, had he been born Ogdonski, in Minsk rather than Mansfield, his profile would have been greater. Perhaps; but would he have been a finer musician?

If you were born in Huyton, the son of a docker, the odds against gaining international recognition are greater still. Yet, in his 42nd year, that is where Paul Lewis stands today as he approaches the final furlong of a three-year survey of Schubert. He has been here before, having explored all Schubert’s sonatas over the past decade, and he will return to this magnificent music so long as he breathes, for it is in his blood. But he is now in that enviable position — enviable for us, the listeners — of ripening before our ears. The rivers of intellect and feeling are coming together in a way that marks out this puckish Liverpudlian as a musician of rare gifts.

Musician, note; not merely a piano player. In a phrase he himself uses to describe his mentor, he calls Alfred Brendel ‘a musician first, then a pianist’. Whatever Lewis is, he is not ‘brilliant’, at least not in a way that the modern world, with its PR gimmickry and oven-baked ‘stars’, often demands. Brilliance suggests surface glitter. It has unwelcome echoes of the hothouse whereas true musicianship requires a gradual maturation.

It was Brendel who heard Lewis when, as a 20-year-old student at Guildhall, the latter was asked to play a Haydn sonata as part of a tutorial Brendel gave at the college.