Paul Lewis

Auditorio de Tenerife, as part of its Chamber Music Cycle, programmes for this season a complete Schubert work consisting of four concerts by the pianist Paul Lewis.

The complete piano sonatas by Schubert take us on a unique and heartbreaking journey through the last 12 years of his life. From the charming lyricism of the early sonatas to the transcendent creativity of the last masterpieces, and the harrowing moments of despair when his health began to decline.

With frankness and sincerity, Schubert's sonatas express some of the most essential elements of human experience: longing, consolation, despair, joy, loss, nostalgia, and hope. In our age, his music remains as essential and moving as ever.

Sonata No. 19 in C minor opens the trilogy that Schubert composed just two months before his death, and which he wanted to dedicate to Hummel. Of great renown, he was aware that he had taken up the baton from Beethoven, who had died a year earlier. These three sonatas complement one another. Exuding an intimate lyricism that is characteristic of the composer, especially in its slow movements, the D958 is the most turbulent and impassioned of the three pieces, with a first movement of colossal power that contrasts with the almost mythical calmness of its adagio. On the contrary, the sonata in A major D959 seems to detail the composer's circumstances in a biographical manner, conveying a bucolic and superhuman peace which at times is transformed into drama and despair. Of large proportions, its second movement is unquestionably the most moving, with a melancholic barcarolle in which the composer seems to bid farewell to the earthly realm with absolute serenity. Lastly, Sonata D960 in B-flat major is the most subdued of all. Endlessly serene and full of contrasts, it constitutes a very mature work of great compositional expansiveness that provided the definitive finale to his repertoire of pieces created for piano.