benefit event
“House concert” for Ukraine: Levit and friends collect donations
Pianist Igor Levit played with the singer Danger Dan (r) in the Berliner Ensemble. Photo: Carsten Koall/dpa
© dpa-infocom GmbH
“As a person, a citizen and also as a musician,” Igor Levit sees his duty to Ukraine. A benefit concert evening with friends in Berlin brings in a decent amount of donations for war victims.
With “house concerts” on the piano, classical music star Igor Levit (35) donated distraction and consolation during the corona pandemic – now he has expanded the format for a benefit event.
Under the motto “#StandWithUkraine”, Levit performed with fellow musicians and actors in the Berliner Ensemble (BE) to collect money for the “Action Alliance for Disaster Relief” and thus for people in the Eastern European country attacked by Russia.
At the end of the two-and-a-half-hour event in the sold-out theater on Schiffbauerdamm, tickets and donations raised over 29,000 euros for a good cause, according to BE. The meeting of very different cultural greats from classical music, pop, theater and television was also artistically attractive – an evening that Levit began with an avant-garde piano piece by the composer Paul Dessau and ended with a Ukrainian folk song sung by the Kiev tenor Oleksiy Palchykov .
In between were the singers Katharine Mehrling and Anna Prohaska, the theater actress Constanze Becker, her colleague Matthias Brandt and opera director Barrie Kosky at the piano on the BE stage. The German songwriter scene was represented by Thees Uhlmann and Danger Dan, who performed his anti-right song “Das ist alles von der Kunstfreiheit covered” with Levit. The musical spectrum was correspondingly wide: from Busoni/Bach and Donizetti to Brecht/Weill and Hans Eisler to current pop songs – some of them with reference to the sad topic of war.
Before the benefit evening for war victims, which he had initiated at short notice, Levit declared: “As people, citizens and musicians, we have a duty to help those who need our help.” However, the opera singer Palchykov had the last word at the acclaimed event in BE. He emphasized that in his home country the values of all democracies were being fought for – and that hopefully everyone would soon be able to get to know a free Ukraine: “We’re really nice.”