Bold approach to Beethoven yields wondrous results
Wigmore Hall Igor Levit ★★★★★
At the end of Igor Levit’s tremendous recital of four Beethoven sonatas, a fortissimo boo cut through the cheering. It startled him, and us. But it wasn’t altogether surprising. Levit’s performance of all 31 Beethoven piano sonatas at the Wigmore Hall, now more than halfway through, is proving to be very strong meat.
What makes it so is the way Levit maximises the strangeness of the sonatas, and makes every note seem supercharged with importance. You could say the same about Daniel Barenboim, and it says much about the stature of this young pianist that that comparison springs to mind.
But whereas Barenboim gives a sense of Beethoven’s immensity through a kind of lordly swagger, sometimes riding roughshod over detail, Levit goes the other way. He wants every note to be placed just so, and every chord to have just the right colour, yet he also wants a sense of sailing close to the edge.
No wonder he stares at the keyboard before he plays, and sometimes takes a deep breath through his teeth, like a weightlifter bracing himself for an almost-impossible lift.
The results on this occasion were often wondrous. The rarely-heard sonata in Eb ‘Quasi una fantasia’ (like a fantasy) begins with a phrase of disarming simplicity, which Levit played with tender lucidity. Then came a startling contrast of key and mood which Levit rendered as a furious blizzard of notes. The contrast seemed absolute, like an abstract painting with a black square placed next to a white one.
That sense that Beethoven deals in absolutes, beyond style, is now deeply unfashionable. These days the trend is to root Beethoven in his own time by playing him on small-toned antique pianos, and giving him a lighter, more classical sound. Whereas everything Levit did projected Beethoven onto a timeless plane. He summoned a thunderous tone from the Wigmore Hall’s Steinway in loud passages, and a world of mysterious, romantic colours in the quieter ones.
Levit’s approach didn’t always work. His determination to put the light G major sonata Op 31 on a pedestal, maximising the contrasts and rounding off the roulades in the finale with finicky precision, seemed overdone. But he did it with such a keen sense of dramatic timing and perfect dynamic control he almost persuaded me he was right. That’s artistry of a really high order.