Igor Levit: Encounter

Igor Levit (piano)

Weighty music for weighty times? Perhaps. Igor Levit’s new two-disc album for Sony brings together Busoni arrangements of chorale settings by Bach and Brahms, and late Brahms songs arranged by Reger, with Morton Feldman’s late piano masterpiece, Palais de Mari. Yet Levit’s combination of unfailing musicality and peerless technique is matched by a transparency of texture and delicacy of touch that shines unexpected shafts of light on these works, many of which featured in the ‘house concerts’ streamed from his Berlin home during lockdown this Spring. Levit himself sees the programme, which progresses chronologically from Bach via Brahms and Reger to Feldman, as a journey from the world of outward phenomena to the inner world, a gradual diminuendo (albeit with peaks – or spikes, perhaps? – along the way) to a purely inner space. It’s a trajectory that might, six months ago, have seemed self-indulgent and self-conscious to some, but with which we can surely all now identify, and over a 100-minute span it works surprisingly well.

The Baroque-to-modern journey was one that Levit traced to splendid effect on his earlier three-disc box of major variation sets by Bach, Beethoven and Rzewski [2015]; here, in a very different context, it is just as potent. Levit begins with Busoni’s set of 10 Bach organ chorale preludes arranged for piano, richly textured and brilliantly adapted to the piano medium, with every strand clearly discernible in this gripping performance. The opening ‘Komm, Gott Schopfer, Heiliger Geist’ BWV667 is jubilant, the ever-popular ‘Wachet auf’ BWV645 purposeful yet quietly poised, while ‘Nun freut euch, lieben Christ gmein’ BWV734 rushes towards its close at dizzying speed. It is the third prelude, ‘Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland’ BWV659, that begins the inward journey, lent more intensity by the celebrated setting of ‘Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ’ from the Orgelbüchlein, and by two settings of the lament-like ‘Durch Adams Fall ist ganz verderbt’. The new-year chorale ‘In dir ist Freude’ is again joyous and extrovert, but the final chorale, ‘Jesus Christus, unser Heiland’ BWV665 brings the set to a sombre (an contrapuntally masterful) close.

Less richly registered, more contemplative than Bach’s organ chorales are those of Brahms, six of which were arranged for piano by Busoni. These arrangements emphasise the autumnal glow of the music, and so does Levit’s meticulous observation of Busoni’s dynamic, articulative and pedal indications. Particularly affecting are the beautiful Advent chorale ‘Es ist ein Ros entsprungen’, with its lovely excursion to the instrument’s upper registers; two powerful settings of ‘Herzlich tut mich verlangen’, the first forthright, the second sinuously searching; and the dynamic contrasts of another ‘deathbed’ hymn ’O Welt, ich muss dich lassen’.

On the second disc, we leave behind the world of chorales and religious certainties, but the preoccupation with death is still there in Brahms’s Vier ernste Gesänge (Four Serious Songs), expertly transcribed for solo piano by Max Reger. It’s a tribute to both Reger’s gifts as arranger and Levit’s as performer that one barely notices the absence of the voice in these gems of Brahms’s late output, so enthralling is this performance, with its abundant clarity of detail, mellifluous phrasing and, where necessary (the closing chords of the first song, for example), incisive attack. The central two songs, ‘Ich wandte mich’ with its downward cycle of thirds and the elegiac ‘O Tod, wie bitter bist du’, are enormously powerful; the fourth song, ‘Wenn ich mit Menschen- und mit Engelszungen redete’, brings much-needed warmth and consolation.

Reger’s own unaccompanied motet Nachtlied, op.138 no.3, in a keyboard arrangement by organist Julius Becker, brings lighter textures into play: though they belie the nocturnal subject-matter, they make an ideal pivot to the spare, bright, tentative sounds of Feldman’s hypnotically hesitant Palais de Mari, inspired by fragments of ancient Babylonian ruins. Here Levit’s slow, steady tempo and phenomenal control of the music’s hushed dynamics make the often almost imperceptible changes in the music’s gradual unfolding even more enthralling than usual, the music poised on the brink between self and nothingness. It often seems that the echoes are all that stand between the performer/listener and emptiness. It’s a long way from the Lutheran conviction with which the programme opened, and it’s a journey that resonates in the mind long after the discs themselves have stopped playing. The album as a whole is captured with astonishing presence by producer and engineer Andreas Neubronner in Berlin’s Jesus-Christus-Kirche. Accompanied by Anselm Cybinski’s exceptionally thoughtful booklet notes, its ultimate message is surely one of hope as much as self-awareness. Certainly none of Levit’s many admirers will want to be without it.