Paul Lewis, the Liverpudlian pianist renowned for his solo Beethoven and Schubert, is fastidious in his choice of recital partners. His work with the tenor Mark Padmore has been a recent touchstone in Schubert’s lieder cycles. In piano duets, his steady temperament has beautifully complemented artists like Imogen Cooper and Steven Osborne.
On the evidence of Monday’s typically secure, thoughtful Great Performers concert at Alice Tully Hall with the violinist Lisa Batiashvili, he’s found another promising collaborator — or she’s found him. This is their first American recital tour together, but Ms. Batiashvili’s sensitive, poised musicianship has been prominent here this season, as the New York Philharmonic’s artist in residence.
Mr. Lewis and Ms. Batiashvili are, on the face of it, among the more perfectly matched of celebrity partnerships. Neither has a willful musical ego that needs to be tempered in a duo. Neither takes great liberties. Each has a subtle eloquence that never devolves into monotony or showmanship. Their moderation is rarely bland.
Together they can play in much the same voice, as in Schubert’s Violin Sonata in A major (D. 574, 1817) on Monday. Communicating with almost telepathic ease and shaping their phrases as one, without forcing the point they made this relatively early Schubert piece sound as if it were one of his last works.
In the simple opening of the first movement’s development section, for instance, the piano plays nothing but gentle trios of chords, while the violin floats down, pirouettes, then reaches back up. It’s an innocent beginning on paper, even naïve, but Mr. Lewis’s anxious bite and Ms. Batiashvili’s aching phrasing gave it a suggestive edge.
Not everything had to sound that way, of course. Schubert’s later Rondo in B minor (D. 895, 1826) was serious but not self-serious, the character of each section singular while contributing to the course of the whole. Only in Beethoven’s Sonata No. 10 in G major (Op. 96, 1812) did I wonder whether this pairing is simply too modest, whether these instrumentalists are too alike to become more than the sum of their parts. Even in gentler works like this one, Beethoven needs ego and a sense of creative tension. Controlled, articulate and often pretty, this performance was a little tentative.
In a neat idea — and a nod to these artists’ prominence as individuals — two solo works followed intermission, but they were too brief, interrupting the concert’s flow. Still, Ms. Batiashvili imbued Telemann’s Fantaisie No. 4 in D major (1735) with commanding energy. For Busoni’s arrangement of Bach’s “Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland” (1909), Mr. Lewis reserved lucid clarity and the sonorities of bells.
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