Schubert: Piano Sonatas Nos 4, 8 & 13 (Paul Lewis)

Schubert
Piano Sonatas: No. 4 in A minor, D537; No. 8 in E flat, D568; No. 13 in A, D664
Paul Lewis (piano)
Harmonia Mundi HMM902690   76:44 mins

Throughout Paul Lewis’s  career the core Viennese repertoire has been central to his music-making. And when it comes to Schubert’s sonatas his magisterial approach is informed by a deep understanding of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. Crucially by the songs too. This gives him both an innate feeling for pacing what Schumann famously called Schubert’s ‘heavenly lengths’, and a touchstone for understanding his lyricism – qualities abundantly evident in the present three sonatas by a young composer still feeling his way. Best-known perhaps are the amiable A major, D664 and truculent A minor, D537; and there’s also the somewhat unwieldy D568 which started life as a three-movement work in D flat only to be recast in four movements and the key of E flat several years later.

It’s a chameleon work whose chaste opening could almost pass for Haydn. That, at any rate, is how Lewis envisions it until the mood turns salon-like and winsome. The disturbing quirkiness of the Menuetto is neatly characterised, and Lewis navigates the somewhat elusive structure of the finale with commanding clarity of purpose. Commanding, too, is the grandeur of the A minor Sonata’s first movement – transformed into bravura and quicksilver glee in the finale. Between them, the E major Allegretto quasi-Andantino is shaped with abiding insight and persuasiveness.

Set alongside a Radu Lupu or Maria João Pires, Lewis’s colours are generally more circumscribed, at times ruggedly clangorous; and his use of the sustaining pedal can be over-generous to the detriment of textures in need of a little more light and air. But his intellectual rigour and dramatic fearlessness counterbalance the occasional want of poetry.

Paul Riley