Beethoven Breathes Through Pianist Paul Lewis

Nothing could be more alive for Paul Lewis than performing the compositions of someone who died three centuries ago, surrounded by an audience of appreciative ears.

“They’re alive in their music,” he says, of people such as Beethoven, whose music Lewis has had a lifelong passion for.

“You can feel the personality of these people very much so in the music,” he says. “It’s something, of course when you’re playing it, it’s very real.

“It’s in the room, it’s present, it’s right in the moment, there’s nothing dead about it.”

Certainly not, when it’s performed by Lewis, hailed as one of the world’s pre-eminent interpreters of Beethoven.

Lewis is the only pianist to ever perform all five Beethoven piano concertos at the BBC Proms, and has been described by the International Record Review as “the finest Beethoven pianist of his generation.”

Why Beethoven?

“First, I just love the music,” he says. “I feel that you’re never finished with it.

“Every time you come back to a work of Beethoven — some thing you could have played for years and you think you know, then you realize you don’t know it. There’s something you didn’t see, there’s something you see differently — it’s music that speaks very directly in a way.

“We can understand what Beethoven’s telling us very clearly,” he adds, “and immediately, in a way that’s much more direct than words.

“If you tried to describe the characters of a Beethoven sonata in words,” he says,” you could end up taking quite a long time over that, but just listening to music puts it in a way that’s far more direct, I think.”

Now he performs at the world’s top concert halls, including Carnegie Hall, Wigmore Hall in London — as well as with the Liverpool Philharmonic, the city where Lewis grew up in a family that wasn’t the slightest bit musical or posh.

Lewis’s father worked at the Liverpool docks and his mother was a council worker.

“They’re not musicians, but they’ve always been really supportive of what I wanted to do,” he says. “They enjoy coming (to hear me perform). My dad has become a little more interested. He wants to get to know the pieces. Wants to talk about the differences between this performance and the last time I played — it’s great, because they wouldn’t have really taken an interest in music otherwise.

“Well, maybe that’s not fair to say,” he adds. “My dad was always a huge John Denver fan. He had all John Denver’s records, so I could probably reel off the entire repertoire of John Denver. But I’m sure you don’t want me to.”

Lewis himself is married to Norwegian cellist Bjorg Lewis, and the two musicians have three children — two violinists, one cellist, no pianist.

“They have a busy agenda and music is part of that,” he says. “Obviously, we don’t care if they become musicians or not, but it’s for us nice that they make friends with it.

“Music is a part of their life — so we certainly want to help them with that.”