Music : Beethoven - Piano Sonatas, Vol 4 (Paul Lewis) Winner of the Gramophone Award for Record of the Year 2008

Rating: - Impressive
The reviewer above is spot-on in his assessment of this set. Lewis' virtuosity allows him to sound spontaneous, secure and sensitive at the same time. He presents Beethoven as a much more agreeable character than we are used to when listening to more extreme interpreters such as Kovacevich or Pollini.

The flipside of the human Beethoven is that the frenzy that can be created in the Hammerklavier (one of the previous volumes) or the last movement of Op 111 is replaced by a range of more down-to-earth emotions. Lewis' Beethoven doesn't do jazz. It's different, but extremely impressive nonetheless. And in further agreement with the other reviewer: the ending of Op111 is pure magic...

---

Rating: - A benchmark set
This (along with the other CDs which form Lewis's complete Beethoven cycle) is the set I would recommend as the best single recording to have if you want just one recording of all these works, and as a recording that everyone ought to want to have in addition to any others. Other performances are wilder, faster, and louder - or generally more extreme - but if you really want to understand the works, these are quite wonderful. You won't really get the point if you're only awake to speed and dynamics, but if you're prepared to listen to these performances seriously you'll find out more about what's going in Beethoven than from any other performances I know. What you have here are deep sensitivity and a great command of piano tone in the service of an outstanding intellect. Extraordinary thought has gone into the voicing of chords, to the balance of parts, and to the shape and structure both of small phrases and of whole movements: and it is not just thought - the thought is deeply felt too. I would mark out for particular mention the last movements of the last three sonatas: the wonderful way in which Op 109 fades away; the way in which the key phrase in the second movement of Op 111 is transformed at the end to create an emotional resolution; and the whole last movement of Op 110 is understood intellectually and emotionally in a way it has been by nobody else - in everybody else's hands we're left with something slightly muddled here, I think, but not in Lewis's performance.
I can imagine that one might prefer to listen to other performances of each of these sonatas, to deal with certain moods, or whatever, but there are no more profound interpretations than these, nor any which reveal more of the possibilities of the music itself.