Some Sunday matinees are not suitable as a light appetizer for a fat roast. From the aperitif in glorious weather in the garden hall of the Prinzregententheater, Igor Levit takes his audience to a parallel world of extreme piano playing in the packed concert hall. The almost 90-minute, one-movement cycle of variations “Passacaglia on DSCH” by the Scottish composer Ronald Stevenson is more of an impertinence than a challenge for the audience and the artists. Stevenson varies the tone sequence D-Eb-CH several hundred times in this work, a homage to Dmitri Shostakovich, who, like Bach, immortalized his own initials in his compositions. With the album “On DSCH” (Sony Classical), which was released in autumn, Igor Levit dared to record this rarely played monster, which he is now presenting live in Munich.
Levit gets down to business quickly, without a big performance and without the Ukrainian national anthem, with which the politically affiliated pianist opened past concerts. The first notes of the concert are the first of the work: D-Eb-CH carved into the keys like a monument. What follows would be hard to endure if it weren’t possible to break away from any prior concert experience. No breaks in movements, no breaks in the concert, one instrument, one artist, one and a half hours. Although the work is based on a three-part rough structure, into which almost 20 variation movements are lined up – from arabesque to fandango, from African percussion to medieval Dies Irae theatricality – it is laid out as a whole with flowing transitions. Stevenson himself found this work to be “aquatic”, i.e. “flowing”, carrying past various scenes.
Such a journey is demanding, cognitively and physically. Like Stevenson’s work, Levit’s playing does not reveal any transitions, not technically anyway, but not in terms of interpretation either. Like an actor, he manages rapid changes of scene, slips into countless costumes and fills them with ceaseless devotion and multi-faceted emotion. He masters the physical challenges stoically, gets up twice almost casually from the seat to strum the strings by hand and gallops through the passacaglia with unflagging attention like a music tamer.
The listener has no choice but to get sucked into this pull. It was only when Levit slowly took his finger off the final tone button that the tension was broken by minutes of applause, standing ovations right up to the back row. Deserved reward for Levit’s courage to conquer such a border-crossing work and proof that you don’t need pleasing sounds to please.