Paul Lewis and Steven Osborne are very different artists: Lewis is essentially a classicist, while Osborne's taste is more eclectic and modern. However, they have one thing in common: they rate as the most accomplished British pianists of the younger generation. The two were brought together by William Lyne for a recital in his farewell Director's Festival at the Wigmore Hall. As a duet, Lewis and Osborne played the greatest of all works for four hands at one keyboard, Schubert's F minor Fantasy. Then each tackled a major work from his own repertory.
It was Schubert for Lewis, and Messiaen for Osborne. Each has made hugely impressive recordings of those composers, and the performances here replicated the kind of thoughtful excellence and sovereign control that characterise their discs. Lewis selected Schubert's A major Sonata D959; he took it at a pace that played down its majesty, but his bright, forward tone was always suavely sensitive to the music's searching modulations, and the explosion of emotion at the heart of the slow movement was unflinchingly direct.
Osborne selected five of Messiaen's Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant-Jésus, in which he made everything vivid and buoyant. Whether it was the cheesy Lisztian harmonies in Le Baiser de l'Enfant-Jésus or the intricate canonic counterpoints of Regard des Anges, the music had real purpose; Osborne took the technical challenges of Vingt Regards in his stride and celebrated the richness of the invention.
Given the quality of their solo performances, their account together of Schubert's F minor Fantasy was a little disappointing - rather safe, rather too emotionally secure, as if they had not had enough time working together to explore the score's darker recesses. There were, though, wonderful things in it: the remorseless tread of the opening section, the edgy trills and disjunct chords of the slow movement, the quick release of the Scherzo, the slow grind of the culminating fugue and, most of all, the final cadence of the work, with the two pianists digging deeply into its anguish and presenting it raw and unadorned.
