Actors are used to giving two performances of the same play on the same day. Not so musicians with their concerts. Yet there is so much to be learned and matured from playing and listening to the same music a second time within 24 hours that it is surprising that concerts like Paul Lewis’s pairing are so rare. Since Beethoven’s last three piano sonatas make up a concentrated 70-minute summation of his writing in the form, it was an inspired idea for Lewis to play a 6pm recital of them, followed by a 9pm return with the same programme.
There were, inevitably, nuances of difference between the two concerts – though these can of course reflect differences within the listener as well as the performer. The compressed opening of the E-flat sonata Op 109 was more subtly articulated the second time around, although the cumulative musical tensions of the finale were built up even more irresistibly in the first concert. The overall rendering of the A flat sonata Op 110 was more sustained in the first performance while that of the C minor final sonata Op 111 was more profoundly exploratory in the second. Overall, it felt as though the playing in the first recital was a little more by the book than in the second, in which Lewis allowed himself a greater degree of impulse. But the evening was a display of pianistic depth, and there are few keyboard works that repay repeated listening more than these.
Lewis can sometimes seem a very self-effacing artist, but these back-to-back recitals confounded such a stereotype. Though the dominant presence of the evening was of course Beethoven, Lewis’s playing of this composer has never lacked personality. The interpretative engagement was obviously dramatic in the implacable opening movement of Op 111 but it was also subtly evident in the shimmering range of tone and weight that Lewis brought to the visionary sonorities and sustained trills of the sonata’s finale.
