PCMS presents Paul Lewis, piano

So how did the live experience stack up to the recording? As one might anticipate, it often exceeded expectations.

Live and wired

Lewis has always been a remarkably polished artist, favoring crisp tempos, precise intonation, and a steady melodic flow between movements. But such technical precision can sometimes come across as antiseptic — too practiced, not entirely free. Listening to him on record, with the benefit of engineering and editing, exacerbates that feeling.

By contrast, hearing Lewis live produces the sense of an artist moving with the music, moment by moment. This seemed especially true as he launched into the E-flat Major’s Allegro with a relaxed, airy touch. The music is energetic and often humorous — qualities Lewis accentuated — but it also contains melancholic coloring as the movement reaches its conclusion. Lewis brought out an appropriately heavy sound through liberal pedal use.

The Adagio e cantabile brimmed with anxiety. Lewis created a sound world verging on dissonance, ratcheting up the tension in the movement’s expansive runs. But this approach segued smoothly into the spirited Minuet finale, in which Lewis offered catharsis and a return to the lighthearted mood of the first movement’s opening bars.

Lewis showed the influence of his mentor, the great Austrian pianist Alfred Brendel, in his reading of the Piano Sonata in B Minor. Brendel’s 1985 recording of the piece remains a benchmark, and Lewis showed how a pupil can absorb his master’s influence while still maintaining a unique individual style.

The opening Allegro moderato was all jagged edges and tense transitions. But as with Brendel, the sharpness and stress of his playing suggested insistence, not ugliness. When Lewis favored a lighter sound, as in the Minuet, the deliberateness of the choice rang especially clear.

Fast and loose

Lewis diverged from his teacher in the Presto finale, playing fast and loose with virtuosic ease. Yet Lewis’s innate exactitude here kept him from dipping into sloppiness. He summoned the musical themes introduced in the sonata’s first movement with clarity and continuation. The daunting final moments, in which one can hear echoes of Beethoven to come, practically leaped off the keyboard.

Beethoven himself opened the bill. Lewis dispatched the composer’s Eleven Bagatelles, Op. 119, with a delightful mixture of playfulness and insight. Beethoven’s publisher initially declined to issue these compositions, calling them too simplistic for advanced pianists and too difficult for aspiring musicians. Time has not validated this opinion, and Lewis’s interpretation drew out the complexity hidden within superficially minor trifles.

Only Lewis’s reading of Brahms’s Four Piano Pieces found the pianist in a frustratingly bland mode, although that could have as much to do with the composer as the keyboardist. My companion described Brahms as the musical equivalent of brown gravy, a sentiment I share — like a meal slathered in thick, heavy sauce, it all tasted roughly the same.

Lewis played Schubert’s Allegretto in C Minor, D.915, as an encore, beautifully capturing the mournful spirit of the piece. But the Haydn sonatas were the evening’s news. As Lewis works his way through Haydn’s vast corpus on disc, let’s hope PCMS continues to engage him for more comparison concerts.