British piano supremo Paul Lewis performs Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto

This December we’re thrilled to be welcoming British pianist Paul Lewis back to Usher Hall for an evening of powerful Romantic classics.  Long regarded as one of the greatest pianists of his age, he’s particularly famed for his performances of Beethoven, a reputation heightened by mammoth tours of Europe and the United States between 2005 and 2007 during which he performed all of Beethoven’s 32 Piano Sonatas and recorded them to great acclaim, winning Gramophone’s Recording of the Year. In 2010 he became the first pianist to perform all of Beethoven’s Piano Concertos at the BBC Proms.

You can experience Paul’s mesmerising power in Beethoven’s music on Sunday 7 December when he plays the composer’s Third Piano Concerto, whose passion and scale, breaking decisively from the worlds of Mozart and Haydn, helped to make his name as a revolutionary musical force.

For this performance, Paul’s joined by the Concerto Budapest Symphony Orchestra. It’s an orchestra with a proud history going back over a century but, conducted by the visionary Andras Keller, it also has a youthful energy that makes even the most familiar music sound freshly minted. This dramatic programme is the perfect showcase for its uniquely expressive sound, opening with Tchaikovsky’s whirling vision of Dante’s hell-bound heroine, Francesca da Rimini. There’s more passion in store from Franz Liszt’s symphonic poem, Les Preludes, which shares some of the same elemental power as Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. With fierce concentration throughout, this fate-fuelled masterpiece powers its way irresistibly to a blazing finale.