In his current Beethoven sonata cycle, Paul Lewis is setting himself up with, and against, the great pianists in terms of the intellectual and technical challenge. Yet part of the fascination of sonata cycles is the opportunity to see an artist confronting the composer, who in turn was grappling with himelf and with the form. It's rather like grand masters in extended chess series. In terms of psychological engagement, Paul Lewis's approach suggests that he is already reaping the rewards of the experience. This concert for the Cheltenham Music Society was both searching and satisfying.

The programme was astutely chosen, balancing earlier and later sonatas, with patterns of key relationships making subtle, even subliminal connections, and Lewis's warm singing tone common to all. The solemn breadth of the Pathétique Sonata in C minor brought a grandeur to the opening, and there was a brilliance about the passagework that conjured Beethoven himself as the young virtuoso lion astounding Vienna.

In the Sonata in A flat, Op 26 which followed, the dark sonority of the central marcia funebre was all the more resonant for reflecting something of Beethoven's own heroic aspirations; this was the music played at his own funeral.

Equally revealing was Lewis's juxtaposition of the two sonatas Op 90 in E minor and in A major Op 101, not commonly paired. The first of the E minor's two movements sounded positively radical, its dissonances and cross-accentuation dramatically underlined, while the graceful meandering of the second looked forward to Schubert. The A major sonata was the recital's natural high point: easy lyricism giving way to tautly controlled rhythms, and the adagio's transcendent beauty exploding into the glorious finale, with Lewis treading the boundary between fugal complexity and a delightful capriciousness with a sure touch.