| Growing
up in the birthplace of the Beatles in Liverpool, Paul Lewis
did not spend his youth rebelling with loud rock music against
his parents' exhortations to apply himself at the piano. Rather,
he had to deal with trying to find peaceful moments to practice
Chopin and Beethoven in a household filled with music of ...
John Denver.
"My
dad was a fully subscribed John Denver fan," recalls
Lewis, laughing at the memory of practicing Schubert with
Thank God I'm a Country Boy bouncing off the adjoining wall.
"He was a charter member of the international fan club.
He had every album and would listen constantly. There had
to be a way out."
Lewis
has clearly overcome his repertorially-challenged childhood
environment. At 31, he is regarded as one of the most gifted
pianists of his generation and is in constant demand, renowned
for playing of great interpretive insight, tonal finesse and
technical polish.
"When
performances are so complete, so reasoned and so thoroughly
immersed in the music as these were," ran a typical review
in London's Daily Telegraph, "it seems almost perverse
to analyze them to see what it was that made them so remarkable."
Lewis
will make his South Florida debut Thursday as part of the
Miami International Piano Festival's Discovery Series at the
Lincoln Theatre in Miami Beach. His adventurous and demanding
program will offer two late Beethoven sonatas, Chopin's Barcarolle
and Ballade No. 4, along with music of Scriabin and Busoni.
The Austro-German
keyboard repertoire has figured prominently in Lewis' performances
both in concert and on disc. In his initial releases for the
Harmonia Mundi label, the depth and drama of his Schubert
selections are as striking as his stylish chamber playing
in Mozart's Piano Quartets with the Leopold String Trio.
Yet as
Thursday's program makes clear, Lewis' musical sympathies
go beyond the standard warhorses and show a quirky individuality,
as well as an uncommonly thoughtful approach to programming.
Nearly
all the recital's works hail from the final stylistic period
of each composer. The Beethoven works especially -- Piano
Sonata No. 27, op. 90 and his final sonata, No. 32, op. 111
-- show the composer pushing structure to the breaking point
to accommodate his ever more complex and interior vision.
"They're
kind of seeing how far they go," Lewis says. "Beethoven's
op. 90 is looking back as well as looking forward. I thought
it was interesting to put that with opus 111 because they're
both two-movement pieces having the same tonal scheme but
finding their solutions in very different ways. There's struggle
in the first movement and op. 90 comes out in a songlike very
human answer, whereas op. 111 tells us more about what's just
beyond the human side."
Another
link is that Scriabin and Busoni were both heavily influenced,
albeit in very different ways, by Chopin. "With early
Scriabin that's obvious, but I think even in the weirdness,
there's something that's retained there," says Lewis.
Lewis'
taste for the venturesome is most apparent with three of the
Seven Elegies by Ferruccio Busoni, in which the Italian composer
refined his previous virtuosic abandon to essentials.
"They're
quite austere and otherworldly in their character," says
Lewis. "All'Italia is more popular-sounding, but the
other two are fleeting and mercurial. Nach der Wendung is
really quite detached in its way. But it's great music and
it's music in which he felt he really found his mature musical
language."
Though
his acclaimed recordings have brought him worldwide attention,
Lewis' career has been largely based in Great Britain and
Europe to date. For the English pianist, it's been a case
of steady rise rather than overnight sensation.
After
escaping his Denverian home environment, Lewis received early
training at Chetham's School of Music in Manchester. His career
got a major boost when he took second place at the World Piano
Competition in London in 1994.
His most
significant influence remains his training at The Guildhall,
especially his time spent there as a pupil of the pianist
Alfred Brendel.
He credits
Brendel with giving him an entirely new and different way
of looking at his instrument, reflecting his celebrated older
colleague's approach as a pure musician apart from being a
pianist. "The fact that he plays the piano doesn't really
matter," says Lewis. "His musical approach is to
see the piano as a range of possibilities and a range of colors."
Lewis
recalls in particular a memorable five-hour marathon in which
Brendel essentially took apart and reassembled Lewis' playing
of Liszt's epic Dante Sonata. Lewis likens Brendel's method
to that of an exacting conductor in an orchestra rehearsal.
"It
was memorable for all the wrong reasons as well," he
says, laughing. "He's pretty tough. It's just the music
that matters and in that sense he almost forgets that you're
there. It's like taking each strand of an orchestra apart
and having everybody play on their own to define colors and
strands of sounds and character within the texture."
Lewis
suffered from something like tutorial shellshock afterward.
"I thought I knew the piece but then I realized I didn't.
For a long time I couldn't even play it afterward."
Liszt's
music will be featured on Lewis' next recording, with the
B minor Sonata and late keyboard works. But increasingly it
is Beethoven that will occupy Lewis' attention in the near
future (as well as his family -- he and his wife, cellist
Bjorg Vaernes, are expecting their first child in September).
Over the
next two years, the pianist will present complete cycles of
Beethoven's 32 sonatas in a variety of international venues.
With a
century of great Beethoven performances available on disc,
from Artur Schnabel to Wilhelm Kempff and his own mentor Brendel,
Lewis says he makes it a point to study the score alone.
"I
definitely avoid listening to recordings when I'm actually
studying a piece and when I'm performing it," he says.
"The problem is you never know what you take on subconsciously
even if you don't intend to.
"
I just try to wipe the slate clean," adds Lewis. "It's
just a pure pleasure of doing it -- to spend two whole years
with the music you love the most is a great privilege."
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