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Stories   >   Love and death are the twin flames of Igor Levit's new double album: Tristan / The Guardian

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Love and death are the twin flames of Igor Levit's new double album: Tristan / The Guardian

Posted: September 27, 2022

On Igor Levit’s album “Tristan” the pianist explores nocturnal themes of love and death, fear, ecstasy, loneliness & redemption in the music of Richard Wagner, Franz Liszt, Gustav Mahler & Hans Werner Henze. Includes his first concerto recording with the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig under Franz Welser-Möst.

The five works that feature on Igor Levit’s latest double album span a period of 135 years that extends from around 1837 to 1973. Very different genres are represented here. Only one of these works was originally conceived for piano solo, but Igor Levit’s exploration of borderline experiences in our lives – death in Life (2018), spirituality in Encounter (2020) and now, with Tristan, the link between love, death and our need for redemption – inevitably means that it is not just masterpieces for the piano that are central to his concern but, above all, compositions in which certain thematic associations find their most personal expression.

And yet Levit’s own thoughts revolve less around the themes of love and death as such than around the experience of night and of the nocturnal as a dark alternative to our conscious actions by day. Exceptional psychological states set the tone here: “Night has so many faces. It can signal a place of refuge or the loss of control, it signifies love and death, and it is the place where we feel our deepest, most paranoid fears,” says Levit. “The Adagio from Mahler’s Tenth Symphony contains a famous outburst of pain in the form of a dissonant chord, and Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde is all about a kind of emotional nuclear meltdown. All of the piece’s essential actions take place at night. In his reminiscences, Hans Werner Henze likewise recalled his work on Tristan as a time of nightmares and of dreamlike hallucinations."

The Guardian's Fiona Maddocks writes….Never try to second-guess the Russian-German pianist Igor Levit. Love and death are the twin flames of his new double album. Contrasting with the polychromatic presentation of last year’s On DSCH, his new Tristan (Sony) has monochrome sobriety. The unifying theme is the Tristan legend made famous by Wagner and explored by others, in homage and inspiration.

As you might expect, Levit’s choices are daring, one disc largely occupied by Hans Werner Henze’s six-movement Tristan (1974). This neglected work, full of allusion and tender sensuality, is written for piano, electronic tapes and orchestra, here the Leipzig Gewandhaus conducted by Franz Welser-Möst. Bridging the Henze with Wagner’s prelude to Tristan und Isolde (arr. Zoltán Kocsis), Levit shines light on the dissonant enigma that is the Adagio from Mahler’s 10th symphony, in the transcription by Ronald Stevenson. Liszt’s Transcendental Etude No 11, “Harmonies du soir”, with its rippling, harp-like left hand and song-like right-hand chords, bursts into radiance then subsides to a shadowy, tranquil ending, the disc’s perfect finale.

Look out, too, for Levit’s book, coming soon, with Florian Zinnecker: House Concert (Polity), based on the lockdown concerts Levit played from his Berlin flat, winning an avid audience around the world.

As artist-in-residence of the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich, the American composer John Adams (b 1947) has worked closely with this orchestra and its conductor Paavo Järvi, helping them prepare his music. The result, called simply John Adams (Alpha Classics), features four contrasting works: Slonimsky’s Earbox (1995), pulsating and vivid, written for the opening of Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall; My Father Knew Charles Ives (2003), the poignant triptych evoking Adams’s New England marching-band childhood; Tromba Lontana (1986), a short, noisy fanfare; and Lollapalooza (1995), explosive and rhythmic, written as a 40th birthday present for Simon Rattle, first performed by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. This short compendium is an ideal starting point for any listener wanting to sample this prolific composer’s rich orchestral vocabulary.

Photograph: Felix Broede

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