Viewed through a chronological lens, Paul Lewis’s upcoming Vancouver Recital Society program makes perfect sense. The pianist will open with Joseph Haydn’s Sonata in C Major, written in 1794. After that, we’ll hear Ludwig van Beethoven’s 6 Bagatelles, published in 1825, followed by Johannes Brahms’s 6 Klavierstücke, from 1893, and then for dessert we’ll go back to Haydn for his brief and cheerful Sonata in G Major, also from the late 1700s.

It should be a satisfyingly circular journey through some of the most revered piano music of the 18th and 19th centuries, but to find his map, Lewis first had to overcome a significant obstacle. As he told an Australian journalist earlier this year, until fairly recently he suffered from “a Brahms problem”.

“And I’d had this Brahms problem for a long time,” he explains, when the Georgia Straight reaches him on his cellphone somewhere in upstate New York. “I felt that there’s such perfection in the craft of Brahms—in the structure, in the way he puts everything together. I really felt that he was almost too obsessed with the perfection of the craft and that the expression couldn’t really come through. I don’t know what it was that helped me to get over this, but at some point I just stopped feeling that it was a problem. It now, to me, feels that the friction between the perfection of the craft and the expression—which is often quite wild and passionate in Brahms—is the point. It’s that conflict which, to me, is the interesting thing about it now; I just didn’t see it like that before.”

This Sunday’s concert is the first in a series that will examine the late compositions of Haydn, Beethoven, and Brahms, a concept that came out of Lewis’s desire to reexamine Haydn’s “wonderful, inventive, engaging” music.

“It’s not exactly overplayed,” he says. “It doesn’t crop up on programs as often as you might think. So I wanted to spend some time with Haydn sonatas…and I came up with Brahms as almost a polar opposite to Haydn, in that with Brahms you have this deep seriousness of expression.

“And then I thought ‘How do I bind these together?’ Well, Beethoven looks in both of those directions,” he continues. “Like Haydn, Beethoven uses humour a lot, although maybe in a different way. Haydn sort of pokes you in the ribs and makes you chuckle, where Beethoven just throws something at you and tries to shock you. So there’s that connection, but also in the late Bagatelles and the Diabelli Variations, there’s a lot of Brahmsian-type music.”

Lewis has another good reason for throwing Beethoven into the mix: for the past several years he’s immersed himself in performing and recording all of the great German’s 32 piano sonatas.

“When you play a whole series of a composer’s works, you…can find an idea in a work, in an early work, that is somehow more developed, more matured later on,” he contends. “And these parallels are often quite important. They reveal a lot about the process that a composer goes through.”

Expect further revelations on Sunday.

Paul Lewis plays a 3 p.m. matinee at the Vancouver Playhouse on Sunday (November 19).