Choose artist...
Stories   >   Cheers, whistles and bravos erupt as Igor Levit connects with his Carnegie Hall audience / The Wall Street Journal

Stories for December 06, 2024

Top 10 for Dec

More Albums with Igor Levit

Cheers, whistles and bravos erupt as Igor Levit connects with his Carnegie Hall audience / The Wall Street Journal

Posted: January 14, 2022

The Wall Street Journal's Barbara Jepson writes….Although the Russian-German pianist Igor Levit has won high praise for recordings of Bach and Beethoven, his eclectic tastes stretch far beyond the classical music canon. During the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, Mr. Levit livestreamed, over Twitter, more than 50 concerts from his Berlin apartment, playing everything from Brahms, Mendelssohn and Shostakovich to piano rags by William Bolcom and Scott Joplin. This longtime Metallica fan is the only classical pianist to cover a song—“Nothing Else Matters”—on the band’s 53-track tribute album, “The Metallica Blacklist.”

And Mr. Levit’s well-attended Carnegie Hall recital last night in the 2,800-seat Stern Auditorium included the world premiere of a piece by the veteran jazz pianist and composer Fred Hersch, who had created the arrangement of “Nothing Else Matters” for him. The program will be repeated at Chicago’s Symphony Center on Sunday; later this month, Mr. Levit has concerto engagements with the Boston Symphony Orchestra (Jan. 20-22) and the Los Angeles Philharmonic (Jan. 27, 29-30).

Opinionated and politically involved, the 34-year-old Mr. Levit has appeared on talk shows in Germany and once played “Danny Boy” in a forest clearing for a Greenpeace protest. At Carnegie, he was garbed in black and periodically hunched low over the piano, as if listening for a particular artistic effect.

Mr. Hersch’s Variations on a Folksong, an exploration of “O Shenandoah,” was one of two defining performances of the evening. It underlined Mr. Levit’s affinity for the theme-and-variations form, a series of pieces derived from an initial musical idea. (Already, his discography for Sony Classical includes Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations, Beethoven’s “Diabelli” Variations, and similarly constructed works by 20th-century composers Frederic Rzewski and Ronald Stevenson. ) In addition, it revealed the pianist’s ability to immerse himself so deeply in each segment that he appeared to be having a private dialogue with the music.

Mr. Levit’s first two solo appearances at Carnegie, in 2017 and 2018, took place in its 600-seat Zankel Hall. But it was clear from the cheers, whistles and bravos that erupted at the conclusion of yesterday’s recital that the pianist has not only developed a larger following here since then, but is able to connect with his audience in a meaningful way.     PHOTO: JENNIFER TAYLOR 

READ THE FULL Wall Street Journal REVIEW