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Liverpool Philharmonic Blog

 In Conversation with Paul Lewis

Superstar pianist Paul Lewis has performed at Liverpool Philharmonic Hall many times since his debut with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra back in 1996.

But despite that, it appears the experience has never lost its lustre – or for that matter, he reveals, a frisson of nerves.

“Liverpool Philharmonic is a very special place for me,” he smiles. “It’s the concert hall that I have the longest connection with, and whenever I go back there it just feels very special. And in a way there’s something in there where I feel the nerves of that little boy, going for the first time to this huge and incredibly impressive space.”

His latest appearance, launching the new 2023/24 season alongside Chief Conductor Domingo Hindoyan, is set to be a rather different experience to his last visit in May 2021, when he performed Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1 to a socially distanced audience as part of an hour-long concert staged within Covid restrictions.

While he seems happy to recall that occasion, he admits that he’s “blocked quite a lot of that time out really…playing to sparse audiences or worse, no audiences at all.”

Paul’s earliest pandemic performances were at Wigmore Hall in June 2020 – and the hall was empty.

“That was quite significant in a way,” he says. “Because it felt like a statement – OK, we’re still here. But it was after that really, continuing to [live] stream from empty halls. I remember there was one in particular where I just thought if I have to keep on doing this, I think I’ll just find another job. I hated it, it was just pointless really. Because that’s not where the experience is. You can go on YouTube and watch a video of a concert, or you can put on a CD if you want to listen to music that way. The experience is in the hall, it’s social interaction. It needs people to bounce off, you need the energy of having people in the space really, that’s how it thrives, that’s what live music is about. And I’m just so glad that we’ve got back to it.”

That is certainly the experience a young Paul got when he first started to attend Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra concerts with his parents in the early 1980s.

While he loved exploring the classical LP collection at his local library in Huyton, it seems nothing prepared him for the visceral experience of hearing those same pieces played live by a symphony orchestra.

“The first few times my parents took me to Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra concerts, the high lasted a week after coming home,” he recalls. “I struggle to explain what it felt like, but there was a high coming off that experience that was like nothing else. And it stayed with me, even now. I can remember Marek Janowski conducting the first bars of Beethoven’s Leonore No. 3 (Overture), and I was 11! It was electrifying and that was when it really struck me that there’s a huge difference in that experience and what it means to be in the space where it’s actually happening.”

It turns out, however, that those early concerts weren’t the first time Paul had been inside the Hall.

As an eight-year-old he made his debut on the Hope Street stage, not at the piano, but playing cello as part of the Knowsley Youth Orchestra.

Although he enjoyed it and had some early idea of being a cellist, he admits “I was rubbish so that was never going to happen”. He now leaves that to his wife, the acclaimed Norwegian cellist Bjørg Lewis.

Instead, Paul found his real affinity with the piano, albeit he only started learning the instrument properly at the age of 12.

During his professional career, he’s become particularly well-known for his performances of Beethoven and Schubert – he’s currently in the middle of a Schubert piano sonata series across 25 locations worldwide.

It’s his third Schubert ‘cycle’, with them coming every decade.

“I don’t consciously make it a ten-year journey,” he considers of the timing, “but when I was around 40 I spent two years with Schubert, and when I was 30 I did a very similar series to the one I’m doing now, with all the completed sonatas. So maybe ten years on I feel that there’s something different that I want to do, the music feels a little bit different, there are other things I can maybe express with it.”

In this latest appearance in Liverpool, he will play two pieces from the American classical canon, including the little performed Copland Piano Concerto – “it’s a fun piece and I imagine it will go down well – at least I hope it does!”

If lockdown had any positive side, it gave Paul the chance to explore and extend his already wide-ranging repertoire, including learning the American’s 1926 work. “When I was at Chetham’s School of Music in the 1980s they had this end of year concert, and one of the kids would play a concerto,” Paul explains. “At the end of my first year there, there was a pianist who was a bit older and who played the Copland Piano Concerto. So I’d known it and I’d wanted to play it since I was 15. I’m 51 now and I’ve finally got round to it!”

It was his idea to pair the piece with Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue.

He says: “They were written within a year or two in the mid-20s, they’re both American piano concertos influenced by the same thing, by jazz and blues, but sounding very different. Gershwin made that bridge from the popular music of the time to classical music, he created that connection, but Copland just took it and pushed it in a very modernist, cutting-edge direction. But you can still hear what binds these two pieces together.”

While Copland is new to his repertoire, Gershwin is an old friend that he played a lot in his 20s.

“About five years ago I decided to bring it back,” he says. “Rhapsody in Blue is just a piece that feels so right, in terms of what it is, it sits comfortably in its skin. It’s entirely its own language. And I do love playing it.”

The concert – and a repetition of the programme with the Orchestra in Gateshead on September 22 – sits in the middle of a busy time for the in-demand virtuoso.

In July, he opened the Proms season at the Royal Albert Hall playing Grieg’s Piano Concerto in a concert that attracted the attention of banner-unfurling Just Stop Oil protesters. The Oslo-based pianist completed his own performance without incident though.

From Gateshead, he’s off to Prague and Tampere, then continues his Schubert odyssey in a quartet of concerts in Britain and Europe. Then, he heads for the States to work his way through all five of Beethoven’s concertos.

First though, there is a return to the Hall where he fell in love with classical music – and 40 years after they took him to his first concerts, his parents will be in the audience once again.

“To keep coming back to the place I was born, and to play with the orchestra I grew up with, feels very special.”

 

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Cookies on our website

Liverpool Philharmonic has updated its cookie policy. We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. This includes cookies from third party social media websites. Such third party cookies may track your use on our website. If you continue without changing your settings, we'll assume that you are happy to receive all cookies. However, you can change your cookie settings at any time.