Paul Lewis: The keys to success

Paul Lewis is that rare thing, a virtuoso pianist who didn't begin as a child prodigy. But, as he tells Michael Church, guidance from Alfred Brendel helped to make up for lost time

It is the height of bad taste – and the reason why so many interviews take place in anonymous hotel rooms – for a journalistic profile to focus on the habitat, rather than on the creature who dwells in it. But when Paul Lewis apologetically ushers me into his home in Chesham, the place seems a metaphor for what we've met to talk about. The house is in a state of becoming: a sea of raw chaos that is visibly being refined into oases of fastidious perfection. Indeed, the whole conversation that ensues in one of those oases turns on his use of the words "raw" (which his playing began as), and "refined", which is what he's now striving for, during the five hours of practice he puts in each day.

When giving one of his trademark Schubert recitals, the 31-year-old Lewis exudes a watchful stillness over the keyboard, occasionally punctuated by a commanding gesture with fist held high. The music has you hanging on every note, with its perfectly judged modulations between great power and a tenderly singing tone; the face may be impassive, but the sounds conjured by the hands have a molten intensity. There are always fellow-pianists in the audience, and there are certain to be more if he wins – as he is hotly tipped to – the Royal Philharmonic Society's Instrumentalist award next week. Sheer musical excellence may be the principal draw, but curiosity also plays its part. For this young man has received the rare accolade of an apostolic blessing from Alfred Brendel, and he also flies planes. Everyone wants to check out "Brendel's boy".

Tall, tousle-haired and sleepy-lidded, he gives a quizzical account of his unremarkable beginnings in Liverpool. "There was no music in my family, but when I was four, a great-aunt bought me a toy keyboard for Christmas, and I was instantly fascinated. At school, I wanted to learn the piano, but as there was no piano teacher available, but there was a cello teacher, I started on that, which I enjoyed in a mild sort of way."

Things changed when his mother joined the local record library on his behalf when he was eight. "Every Saturday, I took out three records – Mozart and Beethoven symphonies – taped them at home, then changed them for three more. The library staff found that intriguing." It just so happened that they had Alfred Brendel's complete recordings of the Beethoven piano sonatas, so he was the first pianist Lewis really got to hear. "But what excited me was not his playing, but the incredible music I was hearing. I desperately wanted to play the piano, and sneaked into the music room at lunchtimes and messed around. By the time I came to have lessons a couple of years later, I at least knew the geography of the keyboard."

Almost all concert pianists begin as infant prodigies: it's extremely rare for this multifaceted talent to declare itself in adolescence. Lewis and his parents chanced to see a television programme on nearby Chetham's music school, but neither he nor they had any great expectations when he auditioned for entry at 12. "Of course I failed. I broke down a few seconds into the piece I'd chosen to play. I had passion, but no discipline." But the examiner spotted something and offered to teach him, with the result that when he auditioned again two years later, he got in. Whereupon, in no time at all, he was tackling virtuoso stuff such as Balakirev's Islamey and Liszt's Mephisto Waltz. "They were raw, but I could get around them. I was just so excited that my fingers could work as they hadn't before. Being a professional pianist didn't feel like a practical ambition, but I was driven."

Lewis's tutor at Chetham was a Russian-music specialist who made him follow the Russian track. When he went on to the Guildhall School of Music, he got a teacher who took him back to basics, and there he realised that Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert were his métier. "For some reason I just feel drawn to this Germanic line. I also love Bach, but I feel very unsure about playing him. Maybe it's physical, the way it lies under the fingers. Every composer has a language that one can feel physically on the keyboard, and maybe I didn't absorb it early enough. Even now, I don't know how to put that right."

And then, one day, Alfred Brendel came to give a masterclass. "I was nervous, and thought he'd probably tell me to give up. He didn't give much away, but at the end, when we all gathered for a photo shoot, he suddenly turned to me and asked, 'How old are you?' I said 20, and that was that. But afterwards he wrote to the principal saying that he'd like me to keep in touch, so I went round and played to him – Liszt's "Dante" Sonata. I'd played it for a long time, it was a piece I thought I knew, but over the next four hours he put me right on that.

"He's an extraordinary pianist in that he thinks about nothing explicitly pianistic – even with music as 'pianistic' as this. For him, it's an orchestral piece, a matter of colours and textures, transcending the piano. How you do it, physically, is your own business: he's just interested in what comes out.

"He dropped a bomb on my whole conception, and when I got home and tried to put his advice into practice, I couldn't play it at all – I no longer knew where the notes were. Only over the next few months did I absorb what he'd said."

The process of re-education continued with slow deliberation over the next two years, but he's adamant that it was not musical cloning. When I ask how he compares Brendel's Schubert recordings with his own, he replies, quick as a shot, that he wouldn't dare. (Actually, his own have no less authority.)

Brendel is famous for having meticulously carried out his own long career-plan: Lewis laughs off any such aims for himself, but does admit that he needs to work in series and blocks. In 2005, he will embark on a complete Beethoven cycle, and in 2007 on a cycle of works by Mozart: that may sound serenely simple, but his current schedule is punishing, with 130 concerts this year. One big competition success cured him of any desire to go further in that direction: he talks with horror of what that obsession can do to pianists who believe it's the only way that they – rather than the other 699 professional pianists listed in the yearbook – can make their mark. This is a cruel business, and Lewis is well aware of his luck.

Has he a secret weapon? Well, he has drawn strength from Simon Callow's book, On Being An Actor. "I love going to the theatre, and I'm fascinated by actors and how they work, and reading that book I found extraordinary parallels – about insecurity, about how you prepare yourself for a performance." And on stage? "There, it's the flip side to what it is for an actor – a musician mustn't get in the way of the music. Sometimes, one makes gestures to visually reinforce the way a sound goes, and the colour of that sound."

But otherwise, Paul Lewis seems almost abnormally normal, with no nerves, no superstitions, no pre-concert rituals (apart from a quick sniff of peppermint-oil to clear his head), and no eccentricities. Apart, that is, from that obsession with flight. "I had a few days off in Cornwall, drove past Land's End airport, saw a sign saying 'Flying lessons', and thought, why not? And I liked it so much I carried on. But it's a long-term ambition. Whenever I have the time, I go for lessons. I want to get the licence."

He's not planning to emulate John Travolta – now a qualified Qantas pilot – but he has checked out other musicians who fly themselves to their concerts. "I love the idea of flight. It's a completely different kind of concentration."