Listening Blind

Whatever your image of the standard background and biography for a world class concert pianist, Paul Lewis ain’t it. Born in Liverpool, the son of a dock worker and a local council employee, there were no other musicians in his family. Lewis’s childhood memories of the music played in the house revolved around records by John Denver and the Beatles. He didn’t even start piano lessons until he was 12. Now aged 46, Lewis is renowned as one of Britain’s finest players. With over a dozen recordings to his name for Hyperion and Harmonia Mundi, he was named Royal Philharmonic Society’s Instrumentalist of the Year in 2003, won the Accademia Musicale Chigiana prize in 2006, became the first pianist to play all five Beethoven concertos in a single Proms season in 2010, and was knighted in the Queen’s 2016 Birthday Honours. His career has been marked by a series of star turns with orchestras from the Leipzig Gewandhaus to the NHK Symphony to the New York Philharmonic. On May 9, he’ll make his Berlin Philharmonic debut. His playing is frequently remarked on for its intensity, refinement, and sense of authority. Not bad for a working class kid who only stumbled upon classical music records by chance in the local public library. But the tragedy of Paul Lewis’s story is that it remains so remarkable. Evidence recently presented to the U.K. parliament by Kings College lecturer (and VAN contributor) Christine Scharff shows that students from private schools are still over-represented in the country’s top conservatories, while intake from the most deprived neighborhoods is less than half of the average figure for the higher education sector as a whole. With recent cuts to music education in the U.K. stripping funding for the country’s state schools even further, this situation is only likely to get worse.