pianist
Igor Levit releases charity album
Pianist Igor Levit at the solidarity concert for the victims of the Hamas terrorist attack in the Berliner Ensemble. photo
© Hannes P. Albert/dpa
It’s about filling your own helplessness and sadness with something meaningful. Igor Levit fights against anti-Semitism with music.
He wants to donate all of the proceeds from the album, which will initially only be available as a download and on streaming services, to two organizations that fight anti-Semitism: on the one hand, to the Ofek advice center for anti-Semitic violence and discrimination and to the Kreuzberg Initiative against Anti-Semitism.
“The idea for the album came very spontaneously, it was based on the question: What can I do to bring meaning into this despair? How can I help the people who do more important things than me?” Two months have now passed since October 7th – the day on which Hamas carried out a massacre in Israel.
“Only two months,” as Levit emphasizes. “I’m no longer trapped in speechlessness. But the pain is just as great as it was on the first day.” Relationships with his friends are important to him: “I only trust individual people – who see the suffering on all sides.” He says he has lost trust in political movements and ideologies. “I’m standing in front of a pile of broken glass.” Music alone cannot heal. “Only people who show empathy and act accordingly can do that.”
There are a total of 15 pieces on his album, mainly Felix Mendelssohn’s “Songs without Words” and a prelude by the French romantic Charles-Valentin Alkan. “The pieces have a certain melancholy quality to them, and I’ve been playing them a lot lately.”
Igor Levit’s album “Mendelssohn: Songs without Words” was released digitally on December 15th by Sony Classical International. It will be released on CD on January 26th.