Paul Lewis, Schubert and the Piano: 1822-1828

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Having spent the last five years immersed in Beethoven’s piano music, performing and recording complete surveys of the piano sonatas and the five piano concertos to tremendous critical acclaim, Paul Lewis now turns his attention to another composer who has always remained central to his repertoire, Franz Schubert, in a two-year, eight-programme series.

Starting in February 2011, Paul Lewis will perform an international concert series, “Schubert and the Piano: 1822-1828”, consisting of 5 solo piano recital programmes of the composer’s piano masterpieces, from the ground-breaking Wanderer Fantasy onwards, including the sonatas, impromptus, piano pieces and dances composed during the last six years of the composer’s tragically short life, a period of intense and supreme creativity unsurpassed in the history of classical music.

The series will be presented by some of the world’s leading venues in London, New York, Chicago, Tokyo, Melbourne, Rotterdam, Florence, Bologna, Oxford, Southampton, Bristol, Perth, Mr Lewis’s home town of Liverpool, and at the world-renowned “Schubertiade” in Schwarzenberg, Austria. The series in London, Florence, Oxford, Bristol, Liverpool, and Schwarzenberg will also feature Schubert’s three Song Cycles, Die Schöne Müllerin, Winterreise, and Schwanengesang with tenor Mark Padmore, with whom Paul Lewis has now recorded the cycles for Harmonia Mundi, recently winning a 2010 Gramophone Award for their recording of Winterreise.

Paul Lewis has always felt a close affinity with Schubert’s music, and his previous focus on the composer won him both the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Artist of the Year Award and the South Bank Show Classical Music Award in 2003.

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