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. ‘I saw the silhouette of his glasses and hair and thought, “What am I doing here?”,’ says Lewis. ‘I was expecting him to tell me to give up but instead he said, “Let’s keep in touch.” And so I went to his house in Hampstead five or six times a year.’
As Lewis has made a speciality of playing Schubert and Beethoven, he could hardly have hoped for a more appropriate mentor. Brendel, like Schnabel before him, played only music that (in Schnabel’s famous words) ‘is better than it can ever be performed’. The young Lewis listened, and learned. ‘It was a privilege to observe at close quarters how a musician like that works. He is very skilled at putting musical ideas into words, and he remains very generous and instructive. He always has words of advice that I expect, indeed look forward to.’
Lewis himself is now a mentor of sorts. As patron of the Chipping Campden Music Festival (5–18 May), which brings great music and musicians to one of England’s most beautiful villages, he is performing Schubert’s last three sonatas there, as well as tackling the mighty D minor concerto of Brahms, which he played for the first time in Bournemouth last month. ‘It is impossible not to love that piece, but it feels daunting. The first time I heard the orchestra play those first notes, well, it was a thrill!’
And so, as he comes fresh to Brahms, he bids farewell for the time being to Schubert, whose later works he has played over the past three years in New York, Chicago, Tokyo, Melbourne, Florence and the Schubertiade festival in Schwarzenberg as well as at the Wigmore Hall, where he is virtually the house pianist. People are now beginning to talk of Lewis’s Schubert as they once did of Brendel’s. A similar intellectual rigour is there, a comparable lucidity, yet all in his own voice. There is an essential ‘rightness’ about his playing, a natural quality that leaves the listener feeling the composer has been well served.
Composed in 1828, in the months before his death at the age of 31, Schubert’s final sonatas (D958, 959 and 960) represent, in Lewis’s words, ‘past, present and future’. It seems scarcely believable that, for decades after his passing, few pianists bothered to play them. ‘Before Schnabel,’ he ponders, ‘were there any decent performances?’ Unlike Beethoven, there was no performance tradition of Schubert, whose music-making was conducted at home with friends. In his life there was only one public performance of his music. It is one of those quirks of musical history that Schubert’s piano music counted for so little for so long but, my word, pianists have caught up now — and how!
‘Attitudes to Schubert have changed so much,’ says Lewis. ‘For years he was considered inoffensive, a gemütlich composer of salon music. Now he is seen as being primarily dark, so there is a balance to be struck. If you focus on the anguish, and the middle one of the last three has a slow movement that is brutal, it is complete anarchy, it can sound too extreme. The trick is to make those extreme moments sound extreme.
‘The first one, in C minor, feels pursued by the past, although there is nothing in Schubert’s music that can be traced back to Mozart or even to Beethoven, who always finds an answer. When you get to the end of a Schubert piece there are often more questions than answers! But in the A major sonata, the middle one, he is beginning to come to terms with something — the last lines are heartbreaking. Those broken phrases are like letting go of your dearest friend for the last time. Then the final one, in B flat major, is the closest Schubert gets to Beethoven. There is no solution but there is, right at the end, a resolution.’
What comes next for Lewis? Lashings of Ludwig, of course. Three years ago he became the first pianist to play all five Beethoven concertos at the Proms, and his set of the 32 sonatas for Harmonia Mundi has won international acclaim. More Schubert, natürlich. His partnership with the tenor, Mark Padmore, with whom he has recorded the three great song-cycles, is a model of its kind, for Lewis is a superb accompanist.
There should be more Schumann in the years ahead, and Liszt, but one gets the impression that Lewis is not a natural Chopin player — ‘it’s music that I recognise, even love, but don’t feel’. There is also a festival every June, Midsummer Music, established by Lewis and his cello-playing wife, Bjorg, and staged in a church near their home in Latimer, Buckinghamshire. ‘We’ve never had any reviews. We’ve never sought any reviews. We’ve never had mikes. It’s just a group of friends enjoying music together.’ A modern Schubertiade, you might say.
In July Lewis plays his last ‘last three’ at Tanglewood. Will he ever tire of Schubert? ‘Never!’ Let us hope he keeps his word.
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