Pianist Igor Levit returned to the San Francisco Bay Area on Tuesday, Nov. 19, for a Cal Performances recital that was at once monumental and intimate. Born in Russia, Levit now lives in Berlin. He is an active recording artist and a frequent soloist with the San Francisco Symphony, most recently when he played Ferruccio Busoni’s daunting 70-minute-long Piano Concerto. He is also an outspoken political activist and critic of right-wing autocracies.
The program at Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall opened with works by Bach and Brahms, climaxing with the entirety of Franz Liszt’s formidable transcription of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. All three selections demanded — and received — a high degree of virtuosity.
This was music performed on a grand scale, in a big venue. Paradoxically, Levit’s choice of repertoire and his focused attention to detail gave the recital a personal and almost intimate quality, as if intent on connecting with every listener. Four years ago, during the pandemic lockdown, the pianist played dozens of solo house concerts to a large online audience. Now that the lockdown is over, he has retained the ability to make that kind of close connection, even in a packed hall.
The program began with Bach’s daring Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue, full of dazzling high-velocity roulades, lightning-fast trills, and freely rendered arpeggios. In the Fantasia, amid a quasi-improvisatory flurry of notes and harmonic surprises, Levit never lost track of the underlying structures and patterns. The Fugue started like a graceful minuet, then almost imperceptibly grew in volume and scope until it became a kind of giant’s dance.
The next pieces, Brahms’s four Ballades, Op. 10, shifted the mood from Bach’s extroverted dazzle to a contemplative interiority. When writing the Ballades, Brahms — barely 20 — was reeling from his friend Robert Schumann’s suicide attempt (and was falling in love with Schumann’s wife, Clara). For inspiration and solace, he turned to Germanic medieval ballads, not so much to tell their stories as to invoke their world of uncanny mythic transformations.
In Levit’s rendering of this music, moments of goblin-like energy were cushioned by periods of serenity. In the Third Ballade, a tumultuous restlessness gave way to a hauntingly quiet bell-like episode in the piano’s high octaves — though the tumult returned. In the lyrical Fourth Ballade, his gentle touch on the keys radiated a peaceful sense of warmth.
Levit is known for his love of the virtuoso pianists of the 19th and 20th centuries who composed long and difficult works. Liszt’s Beethoven transcription consumed the entire second half of the recital.
Unlike 19th-century listeners, we have no great need for piano transcriptions because we can easily access dozens of orchestral performances of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony on our devices. But Levit’s performance seemed not so much a transcription as an entirely new piece — less Beethoven and more Liszt, or rather Liszt in the hands of Levit. Inner voices, often unnoticed in the symphonic texture, leapt out in surprising ways. Rhythmic interplay (of three against two, for example) took on an inspiringly jazzy and percussive energy. The final movement became a thrilling Dionysian frenzy of innumerable notes at high speed and top volume, played with an intensity that seemed to come direct from the heart.
Overall, the program was a statement both about the music of the past and about our own time — sorely in need of Bach’s creative imagination, Brahms’s passions, and Beethoven’s heroic resistance to Napoleon’s imminent conquest of Europe.
Levit introduced his encore, Dmitri Shostakovich’s Waltz-Scherzo from Dances of the Dolls, as a piece he first learned at the age of 5. It was a graceful gift of innocence and calm at the end of a gripping evening.
