United Kingdom Schubert: Paul Lewis (piano). Turner Sims, Southampton, 19.3.2024. (CK)

Schubert – Piano Sonata No.19 in C minor, D958; Piano Sonata No.20 in A, D959; Piano Sonata No.21 in B-flat, D960

‘To recommend that the final three sonatas have been conceived as a consciously deliberate triptych could be far-fetched, and a efficiency of all three of them in succession would put an unattainable pressure on each pianist and viewers.’ So wrote the Schubert scholar Philip Radcliffe in his information to the sonatas (BBC Music Guides – Schubert Piano Sonatas), printed over half a century in the past. But that’s exactly what Paul Lewis did on this live performance – and never simply as a one-off: the programme knowledgeable us that he has carried out his four-part Schubert Piano Sonata sequence ‘at Turner Sims and over 25 different venues and festivals around the globe’.

It didn’t present. There was nothing routine about these performances, no trace of fatigue or of autopilot: all three sonatas have been performed as if for the primary time. The C minor, D958 is often thought of the least well-known (maybe due to its general sombre tone); but after its dramatic opening and its contrasting second theme – deliciously pointed – it already felt as if imaginative worlds have been being traversed. Lewis’s enjoying on this motion was fiery, splendidly sonorous and intense, bringing out the music’s strangeness and ambivalence, not least in its mysterious conclusion. Equally within the Adagio, the solemn, unhurried, hymn-like Rondo theme was juxtaposed with music of a extra disquieting variety. It’s the finale, although, that seals this sonata’s nature. David Truslove, the at all times wonderful annotator of Turner Sims live shows, wrote of its galloping tarantella rhythm showing to deliver a ray of optimism: but in Lewis’s dramatic (and quick) efficiency I heard the rhythm as frenzied, obsessive, slightly below management – not fairly a journey to the abyss, maybe, however one thing from which the music can by no means escape. There are respites, however Lewis’s efficiency left an impression of huge and baleful energy.

A lot in order that it took me many of the first motion of the A significant sonata to recuperate: after D958 it sounded nearly bland. Maybe Radcliffe was proper concerning the penalties of enjoying the sonatas in succession. But my companion’s expertise was the reverse: D958 handed him by, and he solely started to interact with the music of D959. In fact, Lewis’s enjoying was not bland in any respect: it was fantastically poised, and highly effective when it wanted to be.

Within the desolation of its opening, the rising panic of its central part, its temporary tour into the main earlier than the nippiness returns, the Andantino is so bleak that it looks as if an intruder: it’s apt to inscribe itself within the creativeness as a factor by itself, not as part of a bigger design. Lewis left an extended silence earlier than embarking on the playful Scherzo, underlining the truth that these two actions are from two totally different worlds: each of them Schubert’s. It’s tempting to say that in Schubert’s music – as typically in our personal expertise – issues are likely to coexist relatively than to resolve.

Schubert can at all times wash away the angst, at the least in the intervening time, with a lovely melody: in Lewis’s palms the opening of the ultimate Rondo was like balm. His enjoying of this pretty motion was charming – generally gently, generally clamorously so, with a robust left hand. As he got here off the final observe he appeared very drained: the interval was as vital for us as for him (and for the piano tuner).

With the B-flat minor sonata D960 we appeared to have reached a relaxed plateau. The low left-hand trills that shadow the noble predominant theme didn’t, in Lewis’s palms, sound overtly threatening: Schubert gave the impression to be saying that in our human expertise we will’t have the one with out the opposite. This chic twenty-minute motion – more and more characterised, in Truslove’s phrases, by resignation relatively than radiance – appeared to cross very quickly in any respect: or, relatively, to exist outdoors of time altogether.

The gradual, unhappy music of the Andante sostenuto didn’t break the spell: nor, maybe extra surprisingly, did the sunshine, fleet-fingered Scherzo, with its minor-key center part. Schubert appears to have an intuition for proportion. The lightness was nonetheless there within the finale, for all of the heft of its stormier sections: although the G with which it opens, and which tolls at intervals by means of the motion, sounded barely sinister to me – not fairly a ghost on the feast, however like one thing barely troubling within the nook of 1’s eye.

It was clear on the live performance’s finish that we had witnessed one thing extraordinary. After I reviewed the second instalment of Paul Lewis’s Schubert survey right here on the Turner Sims, I implied that I discovered him relatively indifferent, treating us as a warm-up for the Wigmore Corridor: I take all that again, and I’m nonetheless kicking myself for lacking the third instalment (with the fantastic G main sonata D894).

I’ve learn that these three ultimate sonatas was considered a falling-off from the true zenith of Schubert’s works for piano, the much-loved Impromptus D899 and D935. These with lengthy reminiscences could bear in mind Alfred Brendel on the Turner Sims in 1997 prefacing the B-flat minor D960 with an early sonata (D537) and the Impromptu D935. I discovered this live performance given by Paul Lewis a extra full and compelling expertise than Brendel’s (who may generally sound drily didactic): Lewis’s braveness in performing the final sonatas collectively paid off, and his enjoying was excellent in its sensitivity and in its energy.

On the finish of his examine of those three sonatas, Philip Radcliffe writes of ‘the gradual improve of serenity from every work to the subsequent’: and of ‘their important intimacy, generally mixed with an nearly limitless sense of area’. A rustic of the creativeness very totally different from Beethoven’s; to which, for me, Paul Lewis has opened the door.

Chris Kettle