Paul Lewis is a serious artist, and the quality of his playing, beautifully captured by Harmonia Mundi's engineers, is of a very high standard throughout. Particularly fine is the Waldstein Sonata… a performance that can stand comparison with the very best. His Hammerklavier is tremendously impressive, leaving us in no doubt of the music's weight and grandeur.

Throughout all 10 sonatas Lewis's unswerving authority thinly veils his profound immersion in the very wellspring of Beethoven's creative genius. Even the composer's relatively carefree or lightweight gestures are invested with a drama and significance that illuminate them in a novel but wholly natural light. Here is one of those rare pianists who can charge even a single note or momentary pause with drama and significance and convince you, for example, that his lyrical, often darkly introspective way with Beethoven's pulsing con brio brilliance in the Waldstein Sonata is a viable, indeed, memorable alternative to convention.
So, too, is his way with the Hammerklavier, that most daunting of masterpieces, where he tells us that even when the composer is at his most elemental he remains deeply human and vulnerable.
Not for him Schnabel's headlong attempt to obey Beethoven's wild first-movement metronome mark; nor does he view the vast spans of the Adagio as 'like the icy heart of some remote mountain lake' (JWN Sullivan) but rather a place of ineffable sadness. And here as elsewhere he is able to relish every detail of the composer's ever-expanding argument while maintaining a flawless sense of line and continuity.
Faced with such excellence a mere critic can only abandon paper and pencil and listen to this heroic but deeply moving young artist with awe and amazement. These are early days but Paul Lewis's superbly recorded and presented Beethoven may well turn out to be the most musicianly and ultimately satisfying of all recorded Beethoven piano sonata cycles.

The Waldstein here is particularly fine, conceived in a single coherent musical span with meticulous marking of every dynamic contrast; Lewis's quiet playing is a particular joy...This is already becoming a Beethoven cycle to reckon with.