The last time I heard Paul Lewis in recital, he was playing Liszt's great B minor Sonata. That was a rather soft-edged performance, of a work that really doesn't need quite so much TLC. There was Liszt in this latest Festival Hall programme, too – Vallée d'Obermann, from the first book of the Annèes de Pelérinage – but this time there was nothing cuddly about it all. Stark, magisterially sonorous and riven with dramatic pauses, it was the highlight of a recital that suggested Lewis's playing has generally become harder-edged and more severe.
But while that approach was effective enough in Vallée d'Obermann, it seemed much less appropriate to the rest of his programme. Mozart's B minor Adagio K450 is one of his great tragic statements, but when it is as strait-laced as Lewis made it, those depths are never reached, and its moment of consolation in the final bars hardly registers. Even Schumann's C major Fantasy was kept on a tight rein, as though Lewis was viewing it from the perspective of Beethoven before it, rather than through the prism of the romantics who were influenced by the work. While the textures were wonderfully precise (remarkably so in the notorious coda to the second-movement march), the matter-of-fact presentation of many passages was distinctly lacking in magic.
Lewis ended with the Waldstein Sonata. His Beethoven is generally admired for its straightforward musicality and lack of affectation, and this conformed to that image, save for a strangely mannered emphasis in the second half of the opening theme, which seemed to belong to a different performance altogether. The slow movement prepared the way for the finale in a perfectly controlled way, and the finale kept its cool right to the last bar. Much to admire, then – but little to wonder at.
