Igor Levit Performs at Carnegie Hall
Bach Brahms and Beethoven
By: Susan Hall - Jan 13, 2025
Igor Levit, a deeply thoughtful musician, gave voice to Bach, Brahms and Beethoven at Carnegie Hall. Each of these composers was represented by a seemingly uncharacteristic work that revealed unfamiliar approaches.
Bach’s Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue in D Minor, Arnold Schoenberg remarked, is a
12-tone composition. Johannes Brahms in his Opus 10 Ballades, writes poetry with unaccompanied musical notes. Ludwig von Beethoven took a trip through Franz Liszt, who made his 7th symphony portable on a piano expressing 70 musical instruments.
While Brahms's use of poetry without words is expressed in his familiar pianism, Bach composed the Fantasia and Fugue for harpsichord and Beethoven wrote his Seventh Symphony to be performed by an orchestra.
Do Bach and Beethoven survive the transposition or translation?
What do we learn from the piano master Levit?
In Levit’s wide handspan, Bach the improviser is revealed. We’re also privy to musical gestures that create conversation. Speaking notes are revealed. For instance, Levit propels forward a simple figure of two beats, the first held for as long as the following two. A rollicking intercourse develops, joyful and impish. The long note easily follows its doubles. The fantasia is an improvisation that Levit performs in fits and starts. The fugue is orderly, even repetitive, with eleven different statements of the subject.
Levit finds surprises around every turn. An expected note isn’t there. Levit’s fat chords shatter arpeggios.
Fantasia is designed to feel like improvisation. It does. And so too the Fugue. Who improvises the tightly conceived fugue? Bach can. Levit dramatically emphasizes altered subjects. Finally, fortunately, we returned home. Yet now the subject is played in the highest soprano with the left-hand octaves below. All the crazy chromatic ascents end in a descending scale over a repeated bass.
Levit does not attempt to make the piano into a plucked instrument. He accepts the hammers for what they are. Although he did not use the pedal to smooth lines out, he achieved a remarkable legato in lines whose expression was moving.
If Levit is careful to show us Bach’s rhetorical devices in his phrases, he can easily speak to us in Brahms's poetry. Levit likes to speak, yet he never betrays the music. He can be both startling and comforting at once.
In Brahms Opus 10 Ballades, Levit moves us on an interior journey. The first ballade is not a conventional ancient epic,but rather the domestic story of a man who murders his father. The next three ballades are increasingly romantic. In the second ballade, Levit points out Brahms’ ironic self-awareness as he moves toward a ‘wrong’ key. Saved then by a triadic transformation. That the pianist can express all these important subtleties and hold the work together is a Levit gift.
Textural differences between instruments, noted by Liszt on the score of his transcription of the Beethoven Symphony, are not attempted by the pianist. We don’t miss them. Levit’s dynamics and the interrelated melodic lines are so clear. In grand fashion, Levit can whip up a myriad of notes to sound like one. This an orchestra can’t do.
Levit is a pleasure to hear in the formidable acoustics of Carnegie Hall.