Paul
Lewis is one of a select group of artists
who have a special relationship with the Wigmore
Hall: he is everywhere these days, from Schwarzenberg
to Sydney, but he has returned here no fewer
than eighteen times during the past four seasons,
always playing to packed houses. The phrase
‘A beautiful touch, a steady hand, clear and
clean playing full of spirit and feeling…’
which was once used of Schubert himself, perfectly
defines what Lewis offers: in the same mould
as pianists such as Solomon and Kempf, there
is no sense with him that this is ‘his’ Schubert
or ‘his’ Liszt, since all is communicated
in the spirit of the music itself, without
histrionics or any overlay of excessive sentiment.
Mozart’s
B minor Adagio is a solemn piece with which
to begin a recital, and all praise to Lewis
for doing it: no lollipops here, thank heavens,
just intense seriousness and dedication, with
the elegant rise and fall of the phrases so
gracefully shaped, suggesting to he listener
the essence of what we mean when we say ‘Mozart.’
Lewis brought out all the warmth and introspective
qualities of this music without any striving
after effect, and the final minor to major
change was superbly achieved, the coda melting
from hesitation into serenity.
When
I previously heard him play the Kinderscenen
under less formal circumstances, he apologized
to those students upon whom he had pressed
these pieces, since ‘I’ve only recently realized
how fiendishly difficult they are.’ Would
that certain other eminent instructors had
displayed such humility – but let that pass.
They are not, of course, for children at all,
unless one thinks of the Schumanns as such,
and despite the composer’s opinion that in
playing them Clara would have to forget herself
as a virtuoso, they present many challenges,
notably their abrupt changes of mood, a deceptive
simplicity which can so easily descend into
banality in the wrong hands, and of course
in our own time the familiarity of some of
them. Lewis met every challenge, evoking the
delicate hesitation of ‘Von fremden Ländern
und Menschen,’ shaping the well loved ‘Träumerei’
with such fluent elegance that it seemed as
if heard for the first time, and most of all
giving more limpid, poetic tenderness to ‘Der
Dichter spricht’ than I can ever remember.
One
of the special features of Lewis’ art is,
for me, the way in which he shapes and characterizes
the piano music of Schumann and Schubert so
as to bring out its closeness to Song: during
Kinderscenen I was constantly reminded
of the Myrthen Lieder, especially such
phrases as ‘Mein guter Geist, mein bess’res
ich’ from ‘Widmung’ and this quality
was also evident in his wonderfully cantabile
playing of Schubert’s Three Pieces
of 1828. This music is so often played with
the kind of self-indulgence more suited to
Rachmaninov than Schubert, but here it was
given an ideal elegance and rhythmic fluency.
After
the interval, we were asked to refrain from
applause until the end, an instruction readily
accepted as resulting from the artist’s desire
for a quiet pause after each piece: however,
this was not the reasoning behind the request,
this being a bold gesture worthy of Matthias
Goerne in its innovative daring and power
to make us hear well-known works in a new
light, since all three pieces were given without
a break, Schubert’s dances blending seamlessly
into Schoenberg’s ‘little pieces’ which then
melted into the Liszt. Brilliant! The links
between these pieces are as clear as, say,
those between Beethoven’s Gellert Lieder and
Schubert’s Leichenfantasie, but it
takes real individuality to demonstrate them
so sharply in a recital. Schubert’s dances,
as Graham Johnson wrote, are suffused with
a sense of longing, and Lewis brought out
that sense with exquisite poignancy, echoed
in his restrained yet melancholy evocation
of Schoenberg’s evanescent phrases. Schubert’s
Wanderer Fantasy was transcribed by
Liszt the year before he wrote his B minor
Sonata, and the influence of Schubert upon
the later composer is clearly heard in the
noble Andante and the richly coloured Lento
assai of the B minor work. Turning into the
tremendous drama of the Liszt after the lugubrious
cadences of the Schoenberg without any pause,
Lewis played with ferocious technical mastery,
exactly judged drama and above all wonderful
finesse: it is another special feature of
his playing that one is never perturbed by
the structure of such pieces, since he is
so adept at delineating the rhythmic pattern
of individual movements.
Paul
Lewis has come a long way from his first Wigmore
recitals, when friends and colleagues from
his first teaching job used to pack the hall:
nowadays most of them find it hard to get
in to hear him, and that is not surprising,
since this young man, still only in his early
thirties, is the very epitome of everything
that lovers of this music seek in a pianist
– like his tutor Alfred Brendel, he is cerebral
and self-effacing, yet he also evokes the
poetic sensibility of Kempf and the magisterial
quality of Schnabel. For his next Wigmore
appearances he will be joined by the Leopold
String Trio in enticing programmes of Schubert,
Mozart and Schoenberg on December 27th,
and Martinu and Schubert (‘The Trout’) for
the ‘Coffee Concert’ on the 28th
– highly recommended as a cure for any post-Christmas
blues.
Melanie Eskenazi
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