When I read that Paul Lewis is the current Artist in Residence for the Queensland Symphony Orchestra, my heart leapt. I first heard him a few years ago, in a solo recital which included the last Beethoven piano sonata, with its transcendental variations, and I knew that he was a pianist of my dreams, whose technical ability is never on display for its own sake, but always in the entirely un-egotistical service of the essence of the music he plays. Coming to prominence first, not as a winner of this or that piano steeplechase, but as a chamber musician, his playing doesn’t dazzle; it invites, persuades, and is imbued with such a deep desire that his listeners share his profound experience of the poetry at the core of the music he plays.

Paul Lewis with the QSO. Photograph supplied

Last night he joined the QSO in the last Mozart piano concerto, the B flat, K.595. This is not a flashy piece, like the “Coronation”, nor gut-wrenching like the C minor concerto, but a subtle, reflective meditation on the ordinariness of things and the not-so-ordinary behind them. The themes come with an...