UKARIA has scored itself a new piano. It’s a smart-looking and superbly voiced Steinway Grand that replaces the tubby Bösendorfer that never quite convinced.
Fittingly, the man who helped choose this instrument is none other than Paul Lewis, the eminent British pianist, a frequenter of these shores over the last couple of decades and one of UKARIA’s newfound elite performers.
People who remember him from Musica Viva visits or from Guy Barrett’s International Piano Series will know that this Englishman – recently turned Irishman – has a particular, uncanny way of channelling Beethoven. He even looks a bit like Beethoven, at least in the portrait by Blasius Hoefel, with tersely clamped lips and furrowed brow as he descends over the keyboard.
But Lewis, on this occasion, was here to play Schubert – and to show off the new piano. His assignment is to play all the Austrian composer’s piano sonatas over the next two years, at UKARIA, London’s Wigmore Hall and Michigan’s renowned Gilmore Piano Festival, among other international destinations.
Notice how UKARIA is up there now, in piano circles. That new Steinway Model D-274 should help. The benchmark that pianists have come to universally rely upon, this one was individually tuned to UKARIA’s acoustic by London Steinway expert Ulrich Gerhartz, flown out here in January.
The instrument is so new that its bronze feet and innards still wear a pinkish hue.
Its sound is typical Steinway: even but satisfyingly rich, and with a bass that does not overwhelm.
But back to the person who selected it, Paul Lewis, and his wonderful performance of three of the 20-23 piano sonatas that Schubert wrote (depending on whose authority you follow). Lewis began with Sonata No. 7 in E flat, D. 568, one of Schubert’s lesser-known, earlier forays into the piano sonata and a work of joyous, trouble-free spirit.
It sounds like a playful version of Mozart but with unfettered melody. Schubert lets it wander, for pure enjoyment.
Lewis immediately struck the right mood here, with playing of effortless naturalness and the clearest texture.
Was this a product of Schubert’s happy, trouble-free youth? Was it before all his later woes – his love failures and illnesses that tipped him into the abyss? We might never know. Absent in this concert were any program notes to help find answers. All that one could say, and all that really mattered, was that it was like – one imagined – hearing Schubert himself there at the piano.
Lewis channels Schubert even more convincingly than he does Beethoven.
Lucky are those who can remember the Deutsch numbers and call the music to mind, but Sonata No. 14 in A minor, D. 784, is one of the more familiar ones. It opens with a hushed, craggy theme in bare octaves and acquires a phenomenal rugged force that presages Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. Lewis held back to allow its mysteries to fully take hold before unleashing in its ferocious drama. In between were moments of extreme, almost painful beauty.
Here was the anguished Franz Schubert, staring at us right in the face. Lewis’s playing radiated wonderful empathy.
Returning after interval, he was on fire in Sonata No. 17 in D, D. 850. This is another later work that seems triumphal in its excitable bravura but at the same time completely naked in its simple, affectionate melody. What was Schubert thinking? What was happening in his life to provoke such wild contrasts? And what about that sonata’s strange ending, a rondo of alarming naivety that instantly refutes all the earlier hard-won victories?
Again there were no answers to be found, other than to keep admiring Lewis’s total intellectual and emotional grip on this music.
His weighting and voicing of chords has thought, and perfection abounds in everything he does. He is a true poet of the piano.
Clearly this Steinway was to his liking. Ubiquitous in concert halls it may be, but the D-274 is king for tonal evenness. And in UKARIA’s divine acoustic, a piano recital simply doesn’t get better.
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It felt a crime to miss the second of this first pair of concerts, which took place on the Sunday; but gladly there is more to come. Lewis returns in February 2024 to complete this series, so definitely pencil that in.
Paul Lewis performed Schubert: the complete sonatas at UKARIA Cultural Centre, Mount Barker Summit, on Saturday and Sunday.
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