Session report: Paul Lewis and Steven Osborne record Schubert duets

The pianists form a quietly compelling partnership, reports Harriet Smith

Paul Lewis and Steven Osborne: exploring Schubert together

Intense, but never tense: recording in Suffolk's Potton Hall

There’s something compelling about hidden places, and of all the recording venues in the UK, Potton Hall in Suffolk has to be one of the more difficult venues to find. As you head east and the countryside flattens out, the sky expands, its colours taking on a more dramatic hue – an apocalyptic pre-snowfall red and bronze on this particular February afternoon. The entire area is redolent with musical history – not only Potton Hall itself, built to house its original owner’s eccentrically sizeable organ collection, but Aldeburgh itself is only a few miles away, scene of those legendary duet collaborations between Benjamin Britten and Sviatoslav Richter. I remind myself of these on the drive over: it’s playing full of passion, with the heat of the moment more important than perfect technical finesse.

In session are two rather quieter stars of today’s pianistic firmament, Paul Lewis and Steven Osborne, born just a year apart. Lewis’s Schubertian credentials need little introduction, as anyone who knows his compelling sonata recordings for Harmonia Mundi will attest. But it was in fact a project of Steven Osborne’s, exploring late Schubert across different genres, which prompted these Hyperion sessions.

As I arrive, they’re in the midst of the A flat Variations. What’s immediately noticeable is the sheer beauty of sound, the delicacy that they’re achieving, Paul playing primo, Steven taking the secondo part. It’s a far more inward, sheerly beautiful reading than that of Richter and Britten, caught live in the '60s. That they’ve already given several concerts of these works clearly shows: Paul in particular seeming very calm, Steven perhaps a little edgier.

They swap places for the B minor Variations – a work that absolutely deserves to be up there with the other more famous Schubert duets, extraordinary for the way it grows from an unassuming idea, and the far-reaching emotional landscape packed into its short span. Each take is done with complete concentration, and the level of playing is astonishingly high. Not always high enough, though, for these self-critical artists: ‘My flabby instincts got the better of me,’ Steven laughs at one point. And they play it again, still better.