The cult of personality has a lot to answer for. While it has certainly produced more than its share of exciting classical artists who have individual and important music-making to share with audiences, it also has pumped up the careers of numerous glittering but shallow performers whose ability to pack concert halls outstrips what they actually are able to communicate through the music.
Much to his credit, Paul Lewis goes in for musical projection, not personality projection. In the fourth recital of his three-season, five-concert series devoted to Franz Schubert’s late solo piano works, Sunday afternoon at Orchestra Hall, the gifted and probing British pianist kept the emphasis where it needed to be. His personality came through in the intelligent and always convincing choices he made as an interpreter, not through any underlining of self.
This time around, Lewis focused on works composed between 1823 and 1825, music haunted by Schubert’s bouts of ill health, during which presentiments of his mortality (he died in 1828, at 31) shadowed even outwardly sunny creations. Everything was played with the impeccable technique and thoughtful musicality local listeners have come to expect from one of today’s most absorbing Schubert interpreters. The only disappointment was the smallish audience that turned out to hear him.
Lewis built his program around two of the three piano sonatas Schubert cast in the key of A minor, 784 and 845 in the catalog of the Austrian Schubert scholar Otto Deutsch. No doubt all this music will appear eventually in the valuable series of twin-pack Schubert recordings the pianist is making for the Harmonia Mundi label.
The D. 784 sonata represents Schubert’s woes at their blackest. Lewis deftly built harmonic tension through the suspenseful opening pages, his chords firmly weighted and impeccably controlled. The music’s introspective depths were fully plumbed, with a tonal finish worthy of his mentor, Alfred Brendel. Everywhere in this sonata Lewis conveyed the acute sense of depression and loss Schubert must have felt toward the end of his brief life. Like Brendel, he played the finale more as an Allegro moderato than as the Allegro vivace specified in the score, but this made sense in the context of his interpretation.
To the D. 845 sonata Lewis brought a firm grasp of how Schubert creates expressive resonance through discrete use of contrasting materials – the lyrical simplicity of the opening theme set against the hammered, repeating-note pattern of the second, for example. He spun the Andante’s theme and variations elegantly, while for the quicksilver Scherzo his impetuosity played well against the unaffected calm of the trio. The Rondo finale went with a controlled sweep unhindered by a broken piano string.
The smaller works surrounding the two sonatas received no less committed attention.
Lewis brought out the Biedermeier-era coziness of the “16 German Dances,” D. 783, which encompass moods ranging from genial to pensive to melancholy. These embryonic Viennese waltzes require above all else an arsenal of rhythmic inflections and colors the pianist has in his soul and fingertips.
Without pause, he went directly into Schubert’s Allegretto in C minor, D. 915, which is by no means inconsequential music, despite its four-minute length. His sensitivity to the subtle interplay between major and minor was key to the success of the reading.
Lewis allowed time for only one encore but it was a real charmer – Schubert’s “Hungarian Melody” in B minor, D. 817. It capped an afternoon of Schubert playing at its most civilized, one that whetted collective appetites for the final program of the cycle next season at Symphony Center.
Twitter @johnvonrhein
