With two hands or one, pianist connects
Pianist Igor Levit needed only one hand, in the opening piece of his solemn, deeply felt recital at the Herbst Theatre on Thursday, Nov. 1, to conjure a meeting of musical minds and souls.
With his performance of the famous Chaconne from Bach’s Violin Partita No. 2, in a Brahms arrangement for the left hand alone, this fearless 31-year-old Russian-born artist put himself in a probing, intimate conversation with both the Bach original and Brahms’ prismatic interpretation. From the meditative statement of the opening subject to a throbbing bass pattern, desperate runs and hovering chords, the Chaconne emerged in a sheath of new light and shadow.
In two hours given over largely to transcriptions and transformations, Levit kept summoning other voices. The clouds of sound, harmonic complications and eerily sustained notes he found in Busoni’s “Fantasy After Bach” invoked Debussy, Scriabin and Messiaen. Now and then, with distilled simplicity, a murmurous chorale theme stilled the conversation.
Levit segued without pause into Schumann’s Variations on an Original Theme. Like the composer of these “Ghost Variations,” mulling and communing with his own voice, Levit looked inward here. If his articulation wasn’t always clear, through some blurry inner voices and heavy pedaling, Levit’s focus and concentration drew the listener into his zone.
It seemed fitting, for this chiaroscuro evening of concentrated drama, that Levit wore a white shirt untucked over dark trousers. His hunched form brought his face down close to the keyboard for much of the way. When one hand or the other wasn’t in use, Levit would occasionally send it floating upward.
There was another presence, unspoken, in the hall. Levit’s stunning new CD, “Life,” from which the Herbst program was drawn, honors a close friend who died.
After Brahms and Busoni served as presiding spirits in the recital’s first half, Liszt took over in the second. That composer’s transfiguration of music from “Parsifal” fused fragments from the opera, including the knights of the Holy Grail’s urgently voiced march and the supernal Good Friday theme, into a Wagnerian motif sampler. Levit rendered it with a grave theatricality, the melodies and chords mounting, dissolving and remade.
The evening ended in a firestorm, with Liszt’s borderline maniacal Fantasia and Fugue on a chorale theme by Meyerbeer. First written for organ, this fiendish piece sends the performer’s hands thundering through octave ordeals, whirling figurations, a snarling taut fugue subject and one remarkable passage where the relentlessly busy left and right hands keep picking up a densely chorded theme in the middle on the keyboard. Just as wondrous were some delicately stroked hand-over-hand arpeggios.
Lest Schumann’s poignant contribution to the night get lost in all the Lisztian frenzies, Levit offered the most innocently apt encore imaginable — “The Poet Speaks,” which brings Schumann’s “Scenes From Childhood” to its sweetly sonorous close.