NO RETURN TO ‘NORMAL’
PANDEMIC, WAR REMAIN TOP OF MIND FOR PIANIST IGOR LEVIT AS HE COMES TO LA JOLLA
Igor Levit arrived at Carnegie Hall last fall changed by the pandemic. “We are not on our way back to normal. I don’t think we should be on our way back to anything. There is no normal out there,” the 35-year-old Russian-German pianist said at the time, citing uncertainty around the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, energy shortages and climate change.
“It’s not like we’re going through normal. So I find traveling and playing both very intense and yet incredibly rewarding. I cherish every concert I play in a way maybe I was a little bit less aware of pre-pandemic.”
His concert tour arrives in La Jolla on Thursday with a La Jolla Music Society recital that will feature Liszt’s Piano Sonata in B Minor, Brahms’ Six Choral Preludes, Fred
Hersch’s Variations on a Folksong and Wagner’s Prelude to “Tristan and Isolde.”
Levit’s new recording “Tristan” was released by Sony Classical on Sept. 9, and his book “House Concert,” written with Florian Zinnecker, was published in English by Polity in January.
Levit’s playing has a bravura intensity and an elegance, connecting emotionally and intellectually. Outspoken on social media, he is self-described as “Citizen. European. Pianist.”
On March 10, 2020, his 33rd birthday, he played two Beethoven piano concertos at Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie. Two days later, after COVID-19 shutdowns began, he started what turned into 52 streamed concerts from his Berlin apartment. He did not resume public performances before an audience until the spring of 2021.
“I had about 2.3 million people in my living room,” he said. “It was not like I was playing for my phone. I was playing for real people. Emotionally there was no difference. So I knew that there are people and I better treat them with respect and I better try hard and I better play well, because these people gift me with their time, which is the most precious thing they have.”
Levit called his first piano “Lulu” after the title character in Berg’s opera and his second “Monk” after Thelonious. He now uses a 1923 Steinway once owned by the Swiss pianist Edwin Fischer.
He most memorably performed Erik Satie’s “Vexations” on May 30, 2020, a theme and two variations repeated 840 times and stretching for about 20 hours. He paused only for short breaks for water and bathroom trips, and about 800,000 people listened.
“There was actually only one moment where I thought, why am I doing this? Because I was playing for four hours and there was still this pile of papers. I thought, like, there was no progress being made at all. But that lasted for 20, 25 minutes,” he recalled. “It was big fun to do. Then the following day, I was totally high. It was fantastic. I would better not recapitulate how much I drank that day. And then the day after, that’s when I kind of crashed and felt a little drained.”
“Tristan,” largely recorded in the Berlin Philharmonic’s Chamber Music Hall in September 2020, features Zoltan Kocsis’ arrangement of the opera’s prelude, a follow-up to Liszt’s arrangement of the “Liebestod (Love-Death)” featured on Levit’s 2018 recording “Life.”
His book recounts his youth through the pandemic. His family left Russia when he was young and moved to Hanover, Germany.
“There’s a lot of pain because what sounds like an anecdote to you and to the reader, well, let me tell you the fact that a 9-year-old child had to make phone calls for his parents, is very painful for the parents, and we should never leave that out of our perspective,” he said.
“There’s beauty to it and there’s pain to it. And I think that every child who grew up as a migrant and in a new country has very, very similar experiences, seeing your parents struggle, seeing your classmates not really accepting you. Thinking back includes beauty and mostly, let’s face it, pain and in a way sadness.”