Igor Levit’s new double album Fantasia features a wide range of works spanning a period of almost two centuries from 1720 to 1910 and showcases key compositions by Franz Liszt, Ferruccio Busoni, Johann Sebastian Bach and Alban Berg.

The starting point of the four paradigmatic works featured on the double album is the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. Levit has chosen Bach’s exceptional Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue in D minor and combined it with Liszt’s B minor Sonata, a highly charged piece that at the time of its composition looked far ahead into the future (which Levit is currently performing to great acclaim all over the world), together with Busoni’s Fantasia contrappuntistica, in which Busoni perpetuated the Bach tradition, and Alban Berg’s only Piano Sonata.

These four major works are complemented by four shorter pieces including Alexander Siloti’s arrangement of the famous Air from Bach’s Third Orchestral Suite, Liszt’s transcription of Schubert’s song Der Doppelgänger, Busoni’s Nuit de Noël and an early Piano Piece in B minor by Alban Berg.

Sound/Video

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Bach: Orchestral Suite No.3 in D major, BWV 1068: 2. Air (arr. A. Siloti)
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Bach: Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue in D minor, BWV 903: 1. Fantasia – Recitativo
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Bach: Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue in D minor, BWV 903: 2. Fugue
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Liszt: Piano Sonata in B minor, S178: 1. Lento assai – Allegro energico – Grandioso – Cantando espressivo – Pesante – Recitativo –
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Liszt: Piano Sonata in B minor, S178: 2. Andante sostenuto – Quasi Adagio –
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Liszt: Piano Sonata in B minor, S178: 3. Allegro energico – Più mosso – Cantando espressivo senza slentare – Stretta quasi Presto – Presto – Prestissimo – Andante sostenuto – Allegro moderato – Lento assai
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Liszt: Der Doppelgänger, S560/12 (arr. of Schubert’s Lied from Schwanengesang, D957/13)
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Berg: Klavierstück in B minor
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Berg: Piano Sonata, op.1: Mäßig bewegt
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Busoni: Fantasia contrappuntistica, BV 256: Preludio corale – Fuga I – Fuga II – Fuga III [on B-A-C-H] – Intermezzo – Variazione I – Variazione II – Variazione III – Cadenza – Fuga IV – Corale – Stretta
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Busoni: Nuit de Noël, BV 251: Andantino, très calme

Europadisc Review

Igor Levit is one of the most formidably thoughtful pianists to have emerged on the international scene in recent years. Ever since his 2015 award-winning triple-album of variation sets by Bach, Beethoven and Rzewski he has been on a journey to scale the cerebral heights of the piano repertoire. His 2020 double-album ‘Encounters’ put Ferruccio Busoni’s arrangements of chorale preludes by Bach and Brahms alongside Morton Feldman’s landmark Palais de Mari, while 2021’s ‘On DSCH’ coupled Shostakovich’s 24 Preludes and Fugues, op.87, with Ronald Stevenson’s monumental Passacaglia on DSCH. Last year brought Stevenson’s mighty piano transcription of the Adagio from Mahler’s Tenth Symphony and Hans Werner Henze’s Tristan, together with works by Liszt and Wagner.

Now Levit returns to a composer whose music and transcriptions have been a recurring theme on this journey: Busoni. ‘For me this recording of the Fantasia contrappuntistica represents the final destination of the journey that I have been undertaking in terms of my repertory in recent years. This was the work that was still missing from my list.’ It is Busoni’s Fantasia contrappuntistica – a fantastically tangential elaboration on the final unfinished Fugue from Bach’s Art of Fugue lasting over half an hour which many regard as Busoni’s masterpiece – that forms both the metaphorical starting point and the literal culmination of this latest double-album, entitled simply ‘Fantasia’. This is a meaty recital embracing four monuments of the keyboard repertoire, and each is coupled with an encore-length work (or ‘signpost’) by the same composer.

This particular journey starts with the composer whom most pianists would regard as the fons et origo of the piano repertoire: Johann Sebastian Bach. Levit eases us into the disc with Alexander Siloti’s piano transcription of the celebrated ‘Air’ from Bach’s Third Orchestral Suite. It’s a dreamy D major lead-in to the turbulent D minor of Bach’s Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue, BWV 903, which brings out both the demonic and free-thinking aspects of the term ‘fantasy’ (explored in great depth in Eleonore Büning’s extensive booklet notes). And it also illustrates how the fantastical and the orderly (in the form of the Fugue) are not incompatible but rather two sides of the same coin. Levit’s playing is marvellously fluid, the coruscating scales dispatched with dazzling lightness of touch, the rhetorical gestures of the recitative sections judged to a nicety, and the whole performance remarkable for its combination of volatility and technical control.

Bach’s D minor forms the ‘pivot’ to the B minor of Liszt’s genre-busting Piano Sonata (D is the middle note of the B minor chord). And this is a performance every bit as dazzling as the Bach, Mephistophelian brilliance rubbing shoulders with the introspectively beatific central slow section. The way in which Levit attacks the mighty pesante chords of the Grandioso section preceding the ‘slow movement’ is particularly striking: the minims are shorter than usual, observing more closely than most the staccato daggers that Liszt places over the notes. Again, it is the combination of fiery abandon and phenomenal technical discipline that mark this performance as something very special, as well as the range of colours and dynamics that Levit is able to command. And the hard-won transfiguration of the close (where Levit observes Liszt’s revised thoughts regarding the final transition from B minor to B major) dovetails magically into the bleak B minor of Der Doppelgänger, Liszt’s searingly intense transcription of the song from Schubert’s Schwanengesang.

The B minor journey continues on disc 2, with the seductive post-Wagnerian harmonies of Alban Berg’s one-movement Piano Sonata, here prefaced by his still earlier Piano Piece in B minor (published as recently as 1985). The luxuriant tonal probing of this Sonata – by turns tormented and resigned, and always with that Bergian beauty of sound – provides some of the most beguiling moments of this album, and the ‘centredness’ of Levit’s touch keeps even the most angst-ridden outbursts very anchored. The profusion of performance markings in Berg’s score and the work’s formal orthodoxy might suggest the opposite of ‘fantastic’, yet Levit relates these rays of veiled light compellingly to the overall theme, with the music’s microscopically detailed give-and-take drawing the listener in at every point.

There’s a well-judged pause before we are plunged into the stark octaves and rumbling bass lines of Busoni’s Fantasia contrappuntistica. Levit charts this mysteriously fascinating work – with its combination of chorales, fugues and variations – with a mixture of sovereign command and wonderful delicacy of touch. The care over articulation, dynamics and transition are masterly, and above all there’s a palpable commitment to Busoni’s wide-ranging vision and cornucopia of moods, from the grandly imposing to the elusively shimmering. The passages that owe most to Bach make a phenomenal impact – as they should – yet Levit also manages to meld the two great musical minds (Bach’s and Busoni’s) into a thrilling whole. The ending is every bit as overpowering as it should be, a magnificent culmination to an epic journey.

And there Levit could have left it: yet, mirroring the lead-in to the programme as a whole, he has one more trick up his sleeve. Busoni’s Nuit de Noël – a magical soundscape with an opening accompaniment of open fourths and fifths – contains snippets of Christmas carols, yet also has its moments of suspense and darkness, and a surprise cadence at the end, neatly encapsulating the underlying themes and design of the recital as a whole. It’s typical of the intelligent musicality that has underpinned all of Levit’s recent projects on disc, and whether judged as a ‘concept album’ or as a recital by a musician of unusual perceptiveness, it’s hard to think of this release being bettered.