nytimes.

com
Review: Igor Levit, a Pianist for Polarizing Times
Zachary Woolfe
Igor Levit during his Carnegie Hall debut recital on Friday evening. Tina Finebe
rg for The New York Times
As we filed out after the pianist Igor Levits hypnotic Carnegie Hall debut recita
l on Friday evening, a friend made a little musical joke. There wasnt a note of me
zzo-forte in there, he said, meaning that Mr. Levit hadnt much bothered with the s
pace between very loud and very soft.
This wasnt literally true, of course. In a dense and dizzying, intense and consol
ing two hours of music, Mr. Levit played loud, soft and everything in between. B
ut I knew what my friend was talking about: Somehow, without Mr. Levits ever seem
ing to exaggerate, the world he conjured was one of stark contrast. Reality here
was a field of extremes. He is a polarized pianist for polarized times.
Polarized, and polarizing. While classical artists, by and large, remain publicl
y reticent about their politics this isnt Hollywood Mr. Levits Twitter account is
heatedly, gleefully anti-Trump. The tweet pinned atop his account is the statement
he read at the start of his concert in Brussels on Nov. 9, the day after the pr
esidential election, in which he declared, The time of staying-in-my-comfort-zone
is over.
Artistically, Mr. Levit has never been one to retreat to his comfort zone, consi
stently game for unconventional approaches to the repertory. Witness his 2015 co
llaboration with Marina Abramovic at the Park Avenue Armory, in which he and the
audience waited in silence for more than half an hour before he began Bachs Goldb
erg Variations. Recording, for Sony, Frederic Rzewskis 1975 set of variations on Th
e People United Will Never Be Defeated, alongside the Goldbergs and Beethovens Diabel
li Variations, was an unusually high-profile (and persuasive) case for a modern w
orks acceptance into the canon.
Mr. Levit championed Mr. Rzewski again on Friday, playing the American premiere
of four parts of Dreams, a suite of pieces based on a Kurosawa film. Flinty and im
passioned, the movements include the wintry Bells; the trembling, forlorn Ruins; and
the catlike changeability of Fireflies, shifting in a moment from keyboard-slammi
ng rage to delicate grace.
The final number, Wake Up, takes its title from a childrens song by Woody Guthrie,
and the melody is played, sweet and pure, before being taken through darkly drea
mlike transformations. At the end, a wisp of Guthries This Land Is Your Land filter
s through a glimpse, Mr. Rzewski doubtless intends, of what might be possible if
we did wake up, and stayed woke.
Dreams followed, without pause, an opening set of three of Shostakovichs prelude-fu
gue pairings. Mr. Levits interpretation was permeated by wariness, a sense of rep
ression that occasionally exploded as in the fugue in E minor, the almost sputte
ring effusion of a man finally finding his voice.
The Diabelli Variations, which followed intermission, were unsettlingly vivid, wit
h an intensity that extended into the tender passages, but also a warmth and rou
ndness of tone, even in frenzy. When Mr. Levit subtly bent the tempo of the eigh
th variation, he turned an idyll into a nightmare. The transition from the penul
timate fugue to the final minuet, a series of floating chords, really did seem t
o be pointing beyond this world: whether toward heaven or apocalypse, Mr. Levit
kept painfully ambiguous.
While Im sure there are some who frown at the relentlessness of his political sta
tements, who think that musicians should devote their Twitter accounts to public
ist-written plugs for their albums, I cant imagine anyone disagreeing with this p
olemic: Mr. Levit, born in 1987, is one of the essential artists of his generati
on.

newyorker.com
SAnce
by Deborah Treisman
On his recording, Levit is almost unsettlingly controlled; live, he proved more
impulsive.
On his recording, Levit is almost unsettlingly controlled; live, he proved more
impulsive.CreditIllustration by Chang Park
Each week, I receive a dozen or more piano recordings in the mailthe digital call
ing cards of performers looking to join the tiny club of virtuosos who can sell
out Carnegie Hall and otherwise maintain international fame. Some of the disks a
re lavish presentations from major labels, swaddled in effusive press releases a
nd gauzy eight-by-ten photos. Others are self-produced offerings in cardboard ca
ses, with a note attached. There is not enough time in the day for me to absorb
them allnever mind the new-music disks, the Baroque-opera sets, the Mahler cycles
, and the rest. Sometimes I apply what might be called the multitasking test: pu
t a CD in the player, set about other work, and await some strong gesture or upw
elling of emotion that forces full attention to be paid. All too often, the musi
c stays in the background. There is a surplus of pianists who play with glisteni
ng skill and photograph well but who have nothing memorable to say.
A few months ago, the arrival of a dbut recording on the Sony Classical label had
me in a skeptical mood. The cover showed a well-dressed young man leaning over
a piano, languidly dragging his fingers along the keys. The program contained th
e last five sonatas of Beethoven: two hours of sublime riddles, the realm of suc
h erudite masters as Maurizio Pollini and Mitsuko Uchida. What prematurely hyped
whippersnapper would introduce himself in such a fashion? After a few minutes,
I was transfixed. Here was playing of technical brilliance, tonal allure, intell
ectual drive, and an elusive quality that the Germans indicate with the word Inn
igkeit, or inwardness.
The pianist is Igor Levit. He was born in 1987 in Nizhny Novgorod, or Gorky, as
it was then known. His family emigrated to Germany when he was eight, and since
then he has lived in Hannover. He is well known to German audiences and has also
won a following in London, where he participated in the BBCs New Generation Arti
sts program. So far, he is noted chiefly for his Beethoven, though his interests
range wider, from Renaissance polyphony to twentieth-century modernism. He has
worked with the American composer Frederic Rzewski and is exploring Stefan Wolpe
, Morton Feldman, and Kaikhosru Sorabji, whose gargantuan variations on Dies Irae
, all seven hours of them, have lately occupied him. Or so one gathers from his T
witter account.
In March, Levit made his North American recital dbut, at the Park Avenue Armory,
the Gilded Age drill hall on the Upper East Side. The venue was the Board of Off
icers Room, an antechamber that was recently restored and reopened as a hundred-
and-forty-seat recital hall. Its an intimate, sumptuous, mildly spooky space, ric
h in reddish mahogany and adorned with a spear-tipped chandelier that looks as t
hough it had been repurposed from the torture chamber of Gilles de Rais. Because
the sound of a concert grand might prove overwhelming in such confines, the Arm
ory is supplying artists with a Steinway baby grand that, unfortunately, makes a
tinny sound in the upper register. Nonetheless, Levit elicited a broad spectrum
of colors, from silken pianissimos to brazen fortissimos that had an almost ass
aultive effect on those in the front rows.
The program was, again, late Beethoven: the Sonatas Opus 109, 110, and 111. On t
he Sony recording, Levit is almost unsettlingly poised and controlled; live, he
proved more impulsive and imperfect. In a way, this was reassuring. His occasion
al slips came from taking risksnotably, from his almost manic determination to re
alize Beethovens metronome markings, some of which seem improbably fast. The Pres
tissimo of Opus 109 moved at a nearly violent clip. Yet Levit managed to introdu
ce a flurry of nuances and subtleties amid the rush of notes. Early in the movem
ent, two bars of detached, scampering activity are followed by two bars calling
for legato, a smoother, more flowing articulation. Quick contrasts between those
two styles recur throughout. The late pianist Charles Rosen, in his book on Bee
thovens sonatas, observed that players tend to gloss over the distinction, and co
nfessed that he used to do the same. Levit, however, employed the detached-legat
o contrast to create an almost cinematic rhythm, as if jump-cutting between came
ra angles.
In the ethereal theme-and-variations movement that ends Opus 109, Levit revealed
an equal gift for cantabile playing, for spinning out a long, lyrical line. You
nger performers often have trouble falling into the kind of mood that Beethoven
describes as Songful, with innermost feeling. It is the tempo of walking in the wo
ods, of humming to oneself, of finding the slow pulse of nature. Whether or not
Levit indulges in such antiquated behaviorhis tweets make no mention of ithe has a
n uncanny ability to let the music amble away into a summery haze. The extended
bass trill in the sixth and final variation was kept perfectly in check, so that
it murmured beneath the right-hand figures without swamping them.
Something striking happened at the close of Opus 109, after the lilting variatio
n theme lapsed into silence. Levit was so visibly reluctant to take his leave of
the music that the audience made a conscious choice not to disturb him with app
lause. So, after a pause, he began Opus 110. Ive seen pianists request no clappin
g between pieces, or indicate through body language that they wished to play on
without a break. This was different: a touching awkwardness, as if performer and
listeners alike were unnerved to find themselves sharing a private moment in a
public setting.
In Opus 110, Levit again underlined contrasts between hard-driving, strongly acc
ented material and extended stretches in which Beethoven dissolves the piano int
o an imaginary bel-canto ensemble. In the great passage marked Klagender Gesang, o
r Lamenting song, the melodic line became a mesmerizing mirage of an operatic voic
e: it swelled and faded in deep-breathing phrases, it swayed on either side of t
he beat, it even seemed to thin out as it reached for a high note. Levits renditi
on of these nineteen bars was sufficient to place him among the most promising p
ianists of his generation.
He has room to grow. In Opus 111, the most mystical of the series, I began to ye
arn for more shadings in the middle ground between utmost vehemence and utmost l
yricism; the effect of swinging from one extreme to the other lost novelty as th
e evening went on. More wit, more playfulness, more easygoing patter might have
mitigated a feeling of relentlessness, for which Beethoven himself is partly to
blame. Still, the spell cast by the final pages of the sonataone of whose gesture
s Thomas Mann described as the most touching, comforting, poignantly forgiving ac
t in the worldwas profound.
The British pianist Paul Lewis, now forty-one, came to prominence a little more
than a decade ago, with powerfully pensive recordings, on the Harmonia Mundi lab
el, of the late sonatas of Schubert. It was another case of a young player showi
ng precocious command of repertory that stands at the threshold to another world
. Lewis has since established himself as a leading interpreter of Schubert, Beet
hoven, and other high-minded fare. At a recent recital at Zankel Hall, though, h
e took an unexpected turn into Romantic-virtuoso territory: after poised present
ations of Bach-Busoni chorales, Beethoven sonatas (Opus 27, Nos. 1 and 2), and l
ate Liszt, he took on Mussorgskys Pictures at an Exhibition, thundering out double
octaves and stacked chords as if the ghost of the young Sviatoslav Richter had s
eized him. Also unexpected was the coiled snap of Lewiss rhythms: he sounded like
quite a different pianist from the one who had dreamed his way through the firs
t movement of the Moonlight Sonata. The distinction between brains and brawn in th
e piano world, between the ivory-tower musician and the arena virtuoso, is to so
me extent a fictitious one, and Lewis is happily crashing through it.

newyorker.com
Piano Recitals, Refreshed
by Deborah Treisman
At Carnegie, Kissin played Jewish-themed pieces and recited Yiddish poetry.
At Carnegie, Kissin played Jewish-themed pieces and recited Yiddish poetry.Credi
tIllustration by Rui Tenreiro
In the middle of December, the city experienced some peculiar pianist behavior.
At the Drill Hall of the Park Avenue Armory, the fast-rising Russian-German pian
ist Igor Levit played the Goldberg Variations on a gradually rotating platform, as
part of a classical-music installation designed by the artist Marina Abramovi. A
t Carnegie Hall, the established virtuoso Evgeny Kissin intermingled pieces by e
arly-twentieth-century Jewish composers with his own dramatic recitations of Yid
dish-language poems by I. L. Peretz. These departures from routine were welcome.
The recital format has become so robotically predictable that we tend to forget
its origins in the flamboyant self-display of Paganini and Liszt. The very idea
of a piano recital, introduced by Liszt in 1840, took inspiration from stage mono
logues and poetry readings.
The Goldberg project seems to have arisen from a historical misunderstanding. In a
n interview printed in the program book, Abramovi declares that classical-music co
ncerts have always been the same for centuries. In fact, as accounts of Liszts rec
itals show, they have undergone enormous changes in the past hundred and fifty y
ears. What had been a rather unruly affair, with listeners swooning as musicians
swanned about, became an ostentatiously becalmed ritual. Abramovi, a performance
-art celebrity who has lately been concerned with countering digital-age distrac
tions, did nothing to disrupt this latter-day norm; indeed, she further sacraliz
ed the format. Listeners were told to place electronic devices in a locker, take
a seat in the Drill Hall, and meditate in silence for more than half an hour wh
ile the automated platform containing Levit and his piano glided to the middle o
f the space. Noise-cancelling headphones were provided for the purpose of plungin
g audience members into a sonically neutral and calming state.
I found this purgative exercise unhelpful. Far from being calming, the headphone
s gave me a panicky sensation of being isolated and entombed. If we were suppose
d to unplug from modernity, why were we being outfitted with yet another gadget?
At the risk of incurring the artists wrath, I removed the headphones and relaxed
into the Armorys reverberant acoustic, which resembled that of a cathedral after
hours. I thought of Cages 433, which is derived from the realization that there is n
o such thing as total silence: rather than trying to shut out extraneous noise,
we should absorb it. Abramovis concept seemed to be more a symptom of the culture
of distraction than an antidote to it.
More successful was the lighting environment, which was designed by Urs Schnebaum
, a veteran of the international opera circuit. (He recently worked on William K
entridges Lulu, at the Met.) It consisted of a few simple but striking elements: re
ctangular illuminated screens on each wall; a thin band of light extending above
the rectangles; and a light affixed underneath the keyboard lid. In the course
of the performance, these lights slowly dimmed. The scheme succeeded in directin
g the audiences attention toward the pianist while preserving an awareness of the
Armorys immensity. The band of light was like a horizon behind which an artifici
al sun had set.
The conceit came to life once Levit began to play. He is among the finest young
pianists before the public, one in whom impeccable technique is allied with inbo
rn musicality. Having announced himself, three years ago, with a recording of Be
ethovens last piano sonatas, he has shown even greater ambition in releasing, on
the Sony label, a three-disk set of monumental variations: Bachs Goldberg, Beethove
ns Diabelli, and Frederic Rzewskis dazzling 1975 fantasia on The People United Will N
ever Be Defeated, a Chilean anti-authoritarian anthem. He delivers this thunderou
s program with instinctive authority. His collaboration with Abramovi signals tha
t he wont be content with a conventional business-class career, shuttling from on
e lite venue to the next.
Levits recording of the Goldberg finds a middle ground between two historical poles
: the antic manner of Glenn Gould and the spaciousness of Rosalyn Tureck. A shad
e cool and reserved, he lacks the geniality of Murray Perahia, on a classic Sony
disk, or the playfulness of Jeremy Denk, on Nonesuch. Yet Levit, as in his Beet
hoven performances, shows an extraordinary ability to coax a singing line from t
he piano, and he introduces myriad subtleties into the purr of counterpoint, oft
en inserting elegant little ornaments on the repeats. The effect is of strong em
otion held in check by a magisterial intellect.
At the Armory, Levit played more freely, lingering over certain phrases as if he
wanted to hear them echo through the space. The dimming of the lights perhaps l
ed him to emphasize the deepening gloom of the minor-key episodes, in which chro
maticism entwines the rock-solid bass line underlying the cycle. But he hardly f
altered in the faster-tempo variations; if anything, he drove them harder. The w
onder of the Goldberg is that it seems to darken and brighten simultaneously: a fe
w short minutes after the cosmic sadness of the so-called black pearl variation, B
ach unleashes the Quodlibet, in which old folk songs irreverently intermingle. L
evit caught that awesome doubleness: in his enigmatic brilliance, he is Bachian
to the core.
To my ears, Kissin has long been something of a cipher: a pianist of staggering
native skill who has never quite outgrown his wunderkind status. For many people
, the skill is sufficient: Kissin is an artist-in-residence at Carnegie this sea
son, and in November he accomplished the rare feat of selling out two iterations
of the same recital. At the second, a hyperkinetic Appassionata elicited a loud o
vation. For those who may have wondered what lies behind the bashful-virtuoso faa
de, the Jewish-themed program in December was a revelation, foregrounding the pl
ayers passions. You neednt have looked at a personal Web site, which is weighted w
ith links to political articles on Israel and terrorism, to know that his engage
ment with Jewish culture is profound.
The recitations were by no means a vanity project. Kissin has mastered the art o
f declamation, his speech assuming songlike character, his grasp of emotional ar
cs acute. More than at the Abramovi affair, there was a sense of modernity meltin
g away, as a venerable oral culture rematerialized. Peretzs poems are intricate c
reations, fusing a German Romantic vocabulary with a rhapsodic Russian manner. A
s far as I could tell, Kissin was alert to their nuances of irony and melancholy
. A bit of theatre might have heightened the occasion: I wish the lights had bee
n lowered, as at the Armory.
No less bracing was to see Kissin engage with repertory far outside hisor anyonesus
ual fare. The program consisted of Ernest Blochs Piano Sonata, Alexander Vepriks S
econd Sonata, Alexander Kreins Suite Danse, and, for an encore, Mikhail Milners Farn O
psheyd (Before Separating). All the pieces mixed Jewish folk material with early-tw
entieth-century modernist gestures: they often smacked of Bartk in the shtetls. I
 was especially taken with the Veprik sonata, with its hammering, double-octave
insistence on intervals of a fourth and a tritone. The Yiddishkeit emerged only
at the end, and in a hard-nosed, percussive fashion. Strong in itself, the score
was further elevated by the colossal conviction that Kissin brought to it.
The pianist is about to take a sabbatical from performing; as he recently told V
ivien Schweitzer, of the Times, he plans to study repertory ranging from Bach to
Bartk. The next phase of his career may turn out to be the liveliestthe one in wh
ich he forges a distinct identity. At the end of the Carnegie evening, he offere
d a short poem of his own, Ani Maymin, or Credo. It closed with a line that every to
uring artist can take to heart: If I am like the others, who will be like me?