# Brahms’s Late Piano Pieces: Paul Lewis Finds the Pulse Beneath the Reverie
Paul Lewis has been circling these works for years—you could hear it in recitals, feel it in the way he’d program an Op. 118 intermezzo as an encore and let the silence afterward expand. Now he’s given us the complete set of Brahms’s late piano pieces, and the release confirms what those concert moments suggested: he understands that these aren’t just autumnal musings but music with blood still moving through it.
The received wisdom about Opp. 116–119 tends toward the elegiac, the introspective, the resigned. Brahms at sixty, no longer writing symphonies, turning inward. Lewis doesn’t dispute any of that—how could he?—but he refuses to let these pieces settle into mere twilight contemplation. Listen to the “Intermezzo in E Major” from Op. 116: the left hand doesn’t just accompany, it insists, and Lewis voices it so you hear the gentle obstinacy in those repeated notes. The touch is warm but never woolly, the pedaling scrupulous without being fussy.
What strikes me throughout is Lewis’s rhythmic vitality. The opening “Capriccio in D Minor” from Op. 116 has real bite—those sforzandi land with purpose, and the tempo feels like walking, not wandering. He takes the “Intermezzo in E-flat Minor” (also from Op. 116) at a flowing pace that some will find too brisk, but I’m convinced: this reading excavates the suppressed agitation beneath all that chromatic yearning. When the melody returns in the major, Lewis doesn’t milk it. The consolation, such as it is, arrives matter-of-factly.
The three Op. 117 Intermezzi receive performances of exceptional beauty—here Lewis does allow himself more time, though never at the expense of forward motion. That first piece, the “Intermezzo in E-flat Major” with its “Schlaf sanft, mein Kind” inscription, emerges with a tenderness that never curdles into sentimentality. The voicing in the middle section, where the texture thickens into those dense, overlapping lines, is exemplary: you hear each strand clearly, yet the effect remains cohesive, almost orchestral. The Teldex Studio acoustic helps—there’s warmth and resonance without excessive bloom.
Op. 118 presents perhaps the most varied terrain in this landscape, and Lewis navigates it with assurance. The opening “Intermezzo in A Minor” gets a reading that emphasizes its restlessness; those syncopations in the left hand create genuine unease. But it’s the “Ballade in G Minor“—the fourth piece—that really shows Lewis’s interpretive intelligence. He grasps that this isn’t some narrative tone-poem but rather a study in transformation: how the same melodic material can be stormy, lyrical, march-like, all within a few minutes. The coda, where Brahms seems to be pulling the music apart harmonically, sounds properly strange here, not domesticated.
The “Romance in F Major” from the same opus—one of Brahms’s most overtly luminous inventions—receives a performance that honors its simplicity without underlining it. Lewis shapes the phrases with natural breath, and when that chorale-like episode arrives in the middle, the shift in character registers immediately. You don’t need exaggerated tempo changes when the voicing is this articulate.
Op. 119 concludes the set, and by now Lewis’s approach feels fully realized. The “Intermezzo in B Minor” that opens this group has a certain grimness—those parallel sixths in the right hand, the way the music keeps circling back on itself. Lewis doesn’t try to pretty it up. The famous “Intermezzo in E-flat Major” (No. 3) has been recorded into the ground, of course, but Lewis finds something fresh in it anyway: a quality of private conversation, as if Brahms were working something out at the keyboard and we’re privileged to overhear. The final “Rhapsody in E-flat Major” needs to feel like a genuine conclusion, not just another piece tacked on, and here Lewis delivers. There’s joy in this reading—yes, joy—in the way those cascading right-hand figures spill out, in the robust declaration of the main theme.
The recorded sound serves the music well. Enough air around the instrument to let the harmonics breathe, but sufficient presence to capture the attack and release of each note. I listened as a digital download, and the dynamic range is impressive—those pianissimo passages in the Op. 117 set genuinely whisper.
If I have a reservation, it’s that Lewis’s very consistency—the evenness of his achievement across these seventy-seven minutes—can occasionally feel a bit too controlled. Radu Lupu’s old Decca recordings, for all their imperfections, had a certain wildness, moments where the music seemed to surprise even the pianist. Lewis rarely sounds surprised. But that’s almost churlish to complain about when the playing is this accomplished, this thoughtful.
This is a major addition to the Brahms discography, and it establishes Lewis as a Brahmsian of real consequence. He’s found his own voice in this music—probing, affectionate, unsentimental—and the result is a set that will reward repeated listening. Strongly recommended.
