On track: Quicksilver changes in mood

By WILLIAM DART

Come Wednesday, Paul Lewis will share the Town Hall stage with the Leopold String Trio. In the meantime, for just over $30, you can enjoy the artistry that won this young English pianist a South Bank Show Classical Music Award earlier this year.

A new Harmonia Mundi release, the second in Lewis' ongoing Schubert sonata cycle, offers the composer's final two sonatas in A and B flat.

Unjustly overshadowed by Beethoven, Schubert has only comparatively recently been taken seriously by some pianists and the late sonatas, written under considerable duress by their ailing composer, are testaments of the soul. Yet the high-minded sometimes feel uncomfortable with the sheer lyricism of the works; others take Alfred Brendel's statement that the works come "amazingly close to chaos" as a warning rather than an invitation.

A handful of pianists have responded to the challenge of Schubert's discursive forms and quicksilver shifts of mood - most famously Brendel, whose classic 70s recordings are now available, budget price, on the Philips Duo label.

Over the past few years, I've been content with Mitsuko Uchida's thoughtful interpretations on Philips; after listening to Paul Lewis, the Japanese pianist seems distractingly mannerist.

There are writers who turn phrases so deliciously that you find yourself enjoying their craft sentence by sentence. So it is with Lewis, whose phrasing is a thing of great subtlety and wonder. The man achieves infinitesimal degrees of shading between legato and staccato, pianissimo and fortissimo; his pedal can make a chord shudder like a leaf caught up in an autumnal eddy. Needless to say, an exemplary recording catches every inflection.

Lewis' tempi are beautifully considered and generally brisker than his colleagues (only in the Finale of the A major Sonata does he pull back to let one of Schubert's loveliest melodies sing out).

The slow movements are heart-rending, especially the immaculately nuanced Andante sostenuto of the B flat Sonata, with shifts from minor to major that take the breath away. The Scherzo, which can merely bubble and sparkle through its four minutes of life, lets us taste earthiness, anger and lingering regrets. It's not difficult to imagine that Schubert himself lives in this performance.

* Paul Lewis, Schubert - The Last Sonatas (Harmonia Mundi HMC 901800)