I was expecting great things from Igor Levit’s recital in
Princeton on Feb. 4, 2016, but my expectations were not nearly high enough.
The young German pianist stepped far beyond technical
virtuosity and intelligent interpretation, though he certainly possessed both.
To this listener, in a program whose works spanned three centuries, Levit expanded the musical horizons of his listeners and took us on a pathway to understanding that is
uniquely his own.
The pianist brought with him to a remarkable, perhaps
unprecedented reputation. While still in his twenties, Levit has recorded the
last five Beethoven piano sonatas and received rave reviews from critics around
the world for the maturity and originality of his conceptions.
To a full house in Richardson Auditorium, Levit performed
these four works: Bach’s Partita No 4 BWV 828, Schubert’s Moments Musicaux D780,
Beethoven’s Sonata #17 Op. 31 No. 2, “Tempest,” and Prokofiev’s Sonata No 7 Op.
83. He played a Shostakovich waltz as an encore.
A tall, thin young man of 28, Levit walked briskly onto the
stage, wearing a black suit but no tie. Tellingly, his demeanor was confident
and relaxed, but with no discernable touch of arrogance.
The Bach was a revelation. This was big Bach, obviously not Bach
for original instruments, yet it was entirely without hype, not romanticized or inflated,
but clear, steady, and above all, flowing and well paced. There is a tendency
for Bach to sound clunky in the piano, but this was never the case with Levit’s
playing.
One thing that leapt out at me immediately was the respect
he showed to the Baroque ornamentations. These devices—grace notes, trills, and
so forth—were in part introduced in the Baroque era because harpsichords and
other keyboards then in use could not sustain notes for any significant length
of time. Obviously, this isn’t a concern with a modern piano.
To Levit, though, ornaments are not frills to be slighted,
but actual notes to be treated as part of the musical conception. A trill
became a series of notes in a musical thought, forcing us to listen to the work
perhaps as we never had before. The vivid impressions left with me were Levit’s
sustained energy, his focus on the unique character of each of the seven
movements, and his unerring ear for consolidating the separate sections into
one seamless whole. The final Gigue was breathtaking in drive and feeling,
drawing shouts of approval from the rapt audience.
As the Bach taught us a few lessons about trills, the six Schubert
miniatures known as the Moments Musicaux (musical moments) brought out the
notion of conversation in music. These brief Moments have a haunting
tenderness, a veiled yearning about them. I’ve heard performances in which the
bass and treble were fully integrated, and it seemed satisfying at the time.
But no more. Levit’s treatment involved the bass and treble lines sometimes
dividing into different personalities, speaking with and commenting on each
other. In one of the sections, the bass took on a very different tone and
phrasing than the treble, as though the two lines were indeed the voices of two
remarkable, if dissimilar, characters. These works flicker between sunshine
and shadows, sometimes within the same musical phrase, and Levit’s performance
caught their dappling flawlessly.
After intermission, Levit offered the Beethoven 17th
piano sonata. This is an astonishing work, whose effects accrue with
careful study rather than casual listening. Right from the beginning, it is all
Beethoven: five tempo changes in the opening eight measures! As Levit told me
in an interview last month, the first movement is one long 8-1/2-minute
improvisation. And there was never a greater improviser than Beethoven.
What I remember most about Levit’s performance was the diaphanous halo
of pedal overtones surrounding two unaccompanied treble passages in the first
movement. In the midst of an agitated tempest, a vision of calm, but troubled
calm, calm with consequences. This music is very disturbing, yet just about as
beautiful as music can be, and never more effectively rendered (in my
experience) than in this performance.
The formal program ended with Prokofiev’s Sonata No. 7, a
big, “let’s smash the keyboard” show-stopper that again came with a lesson. The
lesson was: there is more to this sonata than a huge percussive sound, and it’s
about a lyricism you may not have realized is there.
Levit can pounce on the keyboard with the best of them, but
who can unleash the loveliness hidden in the second section and playing hide
and seek with the relentlessly drumming chords in the first and third movements?
And what a way to end a concert of tempests, Sturm und Drang than that
thunderous last movement. I scribbled one positive word at the bottom of the printed
program: “Insane!!!” I later scoured YouTube seeking to recapture some of that magic, but none of the well known pianists I encountered came close to this performance paradigm.
The Princeton visit was the first in an 18-day tour of the
United States and Canada for the young artist. You may read more about him in
my interview in the Princeton Packet which appears below. Please note that the
final concert will not be in New York City but rather in Minneapolis. If you
missed him in Princeton, you missed him on the East Coast, at least for this
concert season. Igor Levit is someone to watch for, and not miss, in the future! --Linda Holt
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