Paul Lewis

Paul Lewis – Haydn: Piano Sonatas Nos. 47, 54, 59 and 60 ()
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:09:25 minutes | 1,05 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © harmonia mundi

The vagaries of the market have led a French pianist to record all his albums in England (Jean-Efflam Bavouzet for Chandos) whereas an English pianist, Paul Lewis, recorded all of his for the French label Harmonia Mundi. They both share a real love of Haydn. While the Frenchman has been recording sonatas by the Austrian composer from the start, Paul Lewis waited until he had assimilated Beethoven’s 32 Sonatas and Schubert’s as well, so as to be able to get to the root of the repertoire. For his first album dedicated solely to Haydn, he has chosen four sonatas, 32, 40, 49, and 50, allowing him to deploy his whole expressive range, dispelling once and for all the “Papa Haydn” tag that has for so long dogged the great musical innovator. In Paul Lewis’s hands, Haydn’s music is not that of an ancestor, however good, but of a Viennese classicist, performed with great nuance, a fluid sound and a wonderful, plastic beauty which makes the keyboard sing, underlining Haydn’s joyful and puckish side as well as his passing melancholy. – François Hudry
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Paul Lewis – Joseph Haydn: Piano Sonatas Nos. 20, 34, 51 & 52 (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:07:35 minutes | 1,05 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © harmonia mundi

In 2018, Paul Lewis embarked on an exploration of one of the richest bodies of work of the Classical era: the keyboard sonatas of Haydn. For this second volume, the British pianist tackles some of the most remarkable pieces in this vast oeuvre: the exceptionally concise Sonata in D major, Hob. XVI:51, for example, which is surprisingly pre-Romantic (Schubert is not far off!), or the celebrated Sonata in E-flat major, Hob. XVI:52, with which Haydn conferred well-nigh symphonic dimensions on the keyboard sonata for the very first time.
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Paul Lewis – Beethoven: Fur Elise, Bagatelles Opp. 33, 119 & 126 (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:11:15 minutes | 1,07 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © harmonia mundi

‘Miniature’ Beethoven! In our collective idea of the piano, Beethoven’s name is associated with the monument of the thirty-two sonatas, which have often been elevated to the status of the ‘New Testament’ beside the ‘Old Testament’ of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. Yet, over a period of decades, the composer of Für Elise constantly returned to the genre of the bagatelle, which he called ‘trifles’ but which actually meant a great deal to him. In this small form par excellence, as in the sonata, Beethoven laid the foundations for a flourishing new genre, the piano miniature. Whether they last a few minutes or a few seconds, these Bagatelles are masterpieces!
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Paul Lewis – Schubert: Works for piano, vol.2 (2012)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 02:03:09 minutes | 1,86 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © harmonia mundi

Award-winning pianist Paul Lewis is internationally regarded as one of the leading musicians of his generation. His cycles of core piano works by Beethoven and Schubert received unanimous critical and public acclaim worldwide, and consolidated his reputation as one of the world’s foremost interpreters of the central European classical repertoire. Lewis’s vast Beethoven project, recording the complete sonatas and piano concertos, was greeted all over the world as a landmark and completed in 2011. On this 2012 release Lewis turns his attention back to to Franz Schubert, the other key focus of his concert career and the other pillar of his discography. Schubert’s Piano Sonata, D.845 was the first of his three sonatas to be published during his lifetime. In July of 1825 Schubert wrote a long letter to his parents, in which he stated: “They particularly enjoyed the variations from my new sonata for piano solo, which I performed quite successfully, and several people assured me that under my fingers the keys began to sing. If this is sincere, it makes me very happy since I cannot stand the wretched hacking which is typical of even excellent pianists, as it pleases neither the ear nor the heart.”

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Paul Lewis – Schubert: The Late Piano Sonatas (2014)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 02:09:09 minutes | 1,76 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © harmonia mundi

Paul Lewis is today regarded as one of the leading pianists of his generation, having won the most coveted prizes of the great classical institutions, for both his concert career and his recordings on harmonia mundi, topped by three Gramophone Awards including Record of the Year in 2008. He is also the first pianist in the history of the BBC Proms to have played the complete Beethoven concertos in a single season (2010). Early in 2011, Paul Lewis embarked on a two-year concert tour devoted to the works written by Schubert in the last six years of his life. Now completed, he has played in London, New York, Chicago, Tokyo, Melbourne, Rotterdam, Bologna, Florence and at the Schwarzenberg Schubertiade and the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris.

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Paul Lewis – Mussorgsky: Pictures at an Exhibition; Schumann: Fantasie Op.17 (2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:04:40 minutes | 900 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © harmonia mundi

In 1870, the architect, sculptor and painter Viktor Hartmann (born in 1834) was invited by Vladimir Stasov, the most influential Russian art critic of his time, to join the ‘Group of Five’, a St Petersburg-based circle of composers that, in addition to Mussorgsky, included Borodin, Balakirev, Cui, and Rimsky-Korsakov. The members of this ‘Mighty Handful’ had set themselves the spiritual task of establishing a national Russian music free of western influences. Just three years later, in August 1873, Hartmann died of an aneurysm; he was not yet 40. ‘What misfortune! O greatly suffering Russian art!’ wrote the deeply affected Mussorgsky, lamenting the loss of his friend. Along with Stasov, he championed the cause of a memorial exhibition in honour of his intellectual fellow-spirit. Stimulated by this much-admired retrospective, in the spring of 1874, which presented some 400 pictures from different phases of the artist’s creative career, Mussorgsky decided to erect a musical monument to the dead man as well. He threw himself feverishly into the work. When the piano cycle was completed on 22 June 1874, the manuscript bore the inscription: ‘Dedicated to Vladimir Vasilievich Stasov. Pictures at an Exhibition. In Memory of Viktor Hartmann.’ Mussorgsky created here something subtler and more ambivalent than Hartmann’s paintings might suggest.

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Paul Lewis – Schubert: Piano Sonatas, D. 537, 568 & 664 (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 01:16:42 minutes | 2,40 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © harmonia mundi

Paul Lewis completes his exploration of Schubert’s sonatas, begun almost twenty years ago, with three early masterpieces. The Sonatas D 537 and D 568 display the daring and freshness of their youthful creator, while with D 664, dazzling in its artless charm, he already opens a window towards new musical horizons.

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Paul Lewis – Weber & Schubert: Sonatas (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 57:32 minutes | 865 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © harmonia mundi

Even if both of them were destined to die tragically of illness at a very early age (Weber at 39, Schubert just 31!), the two composers on this disc were healthy enough when they wrote these works, and were even beginning to taste success. Except that it was not to the piano sonata that they owed their fame: not without a twinkle in his eye, Paul Lewis has coupled their works in this genre in order to paint a different and highly elegant portrait of two musical dramatists who were emblematic figures of Austro-German Romanticism.

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Paul Lewis – Brahms: Late Piano Works, Opp. 116-119 (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:17:05 minutes | 1,15 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © harmonia mundi

Paul Lewis explores the world of late Brahms. The old master, far from growing more sedate, deploys a palette of infinite colours and sensibilities in his last four collections for solo piano. By turns tender and dazzling, intimate and tempestuous, these pieces appear to us as their composer’s final confidences, entrusted to a crepuscular diary.
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