Leave aside for a moment the completeness of Igor Levit’s musicianship and consider the stamina and sheer physicality of a recital played without an interval – which, given his programme, would have been welcome – for over an hour and a half, with the main work making jaw-dropping demands on judgement as much as technique. Only in his late-thirties, the Russia-born, Germany-raised Levit seems to have moved on from the ambiguous benefits of cult status and of taking himself too seriously, while his on-stage warm-up stretches suggest a trim virtuoso-athlete who doesn’t take pianistic fitness and heavy-lifting for granted.
His programme was an act of reverence to his beloved three German ‘Bs’, Bach, Brahms and Beethoven, but with the anomaly that only one item, the Brahms, was written specifically for piano. He opened with Bach’s Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue, a work that juxtaposes improvisational wizardry with contrapuntal rigour and is as daring now as it was 400 years ago. Levit’s Steinway sound was full but not over-bright, much to the benefit of clarity and, courtesy of light dabs of pedal, to resonance. In the music’s astonishing scope, one of the pleasures in the swirl of chromaticism was Levit’s discernment of the moments when the restlessness coalesces into the possibility of repose, then moving on to a lucidly landscaped fugue and, at last, a harmonically law-abiding conclusion.
Earlier this year, Levit had devoted a recital to all the late Brahms solo piano collections (mostly of pieces ambiguously titled Intermezzo), music that takes melancholy, secrecy and introspection to another level. His Four Ballades are an early prototype of those later short pieces. The piano tone now seemed subdued, as if lit from within, but with a substance that suited the bard-like rhetoric of the first ‘Edward’ Ballade, which Levit orchestrated with great discretion. The fourth was nearest in spirit to the elusive world of the later pieces, when it became hardest to separate Levit’s powers of intuition and intelligence, an unemphatic regret expressed with fastidious objectivity, where his personality and Brahms’s melded in mutual appreciation.
This was the most private piece of his programme, before he moved on to one of Beethoven’s most public works, the Symphony No.7, recast by Franz Liszt for a medium that Beethoven used for his most confidential, inward-looking music. Any lingering doubts I may have had about Levit’s default aura of self-possession were blown away by the vigour and virility of a performance that kept Liszt on the back-burner as a sort-of sorcerer’s apprentice. Of course, Liszt had made all the pianistic decisions in his arrangement, while Levit returned the music to Beethoven with all the terms and conditions honoured. The repeated Es leading the introduction into the main part of the first movement couldn’t have sounded more orchestral, and Levit’s bat-like ear reminded us of what the piano – a highly finessed percussion instrument, after all – is capable of implying, with magical results, for example, the closing woodwind bars of the Allegretto second movement, when Levit reproduced that unexpected hint of desolation with eerie accuracy. And he certainly made no bones about showing off, with thrilling and vertiginous speeds in the Scherzo and Finale. You really had to be fit to play this. His encore returned us unequivocally to Beethoven and the piano, the slow movement from the ‘Pathétique’ Sonata, played with touching affection.
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