Igor Levit made his political vigilance public early on – not a matter of course for artists of classical music. The musician, who was born in Russia in 1987 and lives in Berlin, wants to be recognized in three ways. His website says “Citizen, European, Pianist”. The bourgeois-social existence ranks for him, presumably, before the artistic. Finally, he also played the piano at a party conference of the Greens, welcomed by Robert Habeck. Quick comparison: his Russian colleague Daniil Trifonov, who is almost the same age, may feel very differently – introverted, hardly approachable in public, at home in the interior of music.
The pianist Igor Levit can now fill the Salzburg Festival Hall just as much as Daniil Trifonov did three weeks ago, as did the great Grigory Sokolov in his solo concert. The artistic credibility of Levit, the Twitter activist who defends himself against right-wing extremism and anti-Semitism, does not lose any of its persuasive power, literally its clout, due to his tendency towards social communication and “interference”. Because “With drums and whistles” is the name of the first of the character pieces from Béla Bartók’s five-part cycle “Im Freien”, which Levit thundered through at the beginning with all brute fervor and dissonant hardness. In the fourth piece, “Sounds of the Night”, Bartók’s musical reflections on nature unfold the magic of gloomy flickering, crackling, chirping, a nocturnal dream scene to which the pianist left its twilight. “Forest Scenes” after.
The program that Igor Levit played in Salzburg can be “read” as a statement of his musical view: interpreting and signifying the most exciting relationship arts. The small “Forest Scenes” by Robert Schumann, nine romantic miniatures, are actually far too intimate for the gigantic space of the Great Festival Hall, but Levit insisted on the delicacy of shaded structures. The musical hearing ability of this pianist, his keen power of observation for tones and nuances is impressive. The secrets of “Lonely Flowers” or “Verrufene Stelle” and the illustrious “Bird as Prophet” remained.
Merging Wagner and Liszt – that is Levit’s ingeniously successful idea here
What followed was a jolt of romantic-existential sharpness, heaviness, force. Richard Wagner’s “Tristan” prelude, piled up in the thicket of dissonance, arranged by Zoltán Kocsis, made Levit an event – but for him only a prelude to the monster of the piano sonata by Franz Liszt. Merging Wagner and Liszt attacca with one another, exciting the inner and outer connection between the two spirits, above all musically, is Levit’s ingeniously successful idea here.
“You have to think very freely and be very open to the transcendent,” said Igor Levit, recently asked about Ferruccio Busoni’s rare piano concerto, which he will soon be playing at the Berlin Music Festival.
The pianist made the singular challenge of the Liszt sonata freely and openly overly clear by meticulously sounding out its tearing tensions – the reconciliation of the “cantando” lyrical and the “grandioso” rapturous with the violent three-way drive. For Levit, after his Beethoven adventures, the Liszt sonata is the hymnic and frenzied excess of an acute romantic attitude to life, namely close to the abyss, illuminated in every detail and at the same time symphonically condensed in the arc of the “elan vital”. The encore, however, is a commitment to the poetry of communication: “The poet speaks” from Robert Schumann’s “Children’s Scenes”.