Modernist Piano Series: Night’s Music
“The performance was gripping through its finale that grew bigger and bigger and bigger.”
-“Neglected music”: Pianist and composer Stephen Lewis performs and champions modernist music; Charles Rose for Oregon Arts Watch, full article
Noon at Dusk (2016)
“Lewis’s score is an elegant, slow moving exposition of the subconscious thoughts and inner arguments of the six cast members. … This constantly shifting sonic world proved fascinating and effective…”
-“The Birthing of a New Opera” in the San Diego Reader, full review
“…its various components fuse solidly to deliver a moving, universal story about what really counts between 21st-century laborers off the clock.”
-“The Light and Dark of ‘Noon at Dusk’” on Phenomenoscopy, full review
Modernist Piano Series: Complete Solo Works of Arnold Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern
“Playing Schoenberg’s music can be for audiences and performers alike. It’s not simply a matter of hitting the right notes or dissecting the obtuse score, but of making music out of the shapes and lines. It is the performer’s job to understand the music on a deep level, to bring out motifs, hidden countermelodies and dynamic movement. In other words, they must make the music vital. Through his expressive playing and his short lectures, Lewis accomplished this lofty goal.”
-Stephen Lewis Performs the Complete Solo Piano Works of Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg and Anton Webern; Charles Rose on his personal critic blog, full article
con mortuis in lingua mortua (2013)
“…an eerie trip to an underworld of foreboding spirits. It is not offputting, not at all, but rather invites us to tread, however carefully, along unknown paths.”
-Elliott Goldkind, New Classic LA
“…powerfully elegiac…”
“…the feeling turns a bit eerie, becoming the musical equivalent of a ghostly apparition.”
“…riveting and visceral.”