The upside of not having got to pianist Igor Levit until now is that if you don't wait long, you can hear him play iconic gay composer Tchaikovsky's The Seasons "live" (from Jan. 26) from London's Wigmore Hall (bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0505zfj). It's a characteristic performance from Levit in that it's utterly unflashy yet completely arresting. And it's yet another indication of the 28-year-old's range. He began the year (also the Scriabin Year) playing that composer's early, surpassingly beautiful Piano Concerto, the very definition of a concert-hall rarity, with the London Philharmonic. And that's just the Russian wing. The next studio CD up, just announced by Sony, is the Levit we think we already know, playing three sets of variations, by Bach (the Goldbergs ), Beethoven (the Diabelli ) and Rzewski (The People United Will Never Be Defeated). That's Levit.
Now, there's a bumper crop of brilliant young pianists who seem eminently capable of filling their greatest predecessors' shoes. I don't know how they all make a living, but as audiences, we've never had it so good. Levit, who is the technical equal of any of them and has all the virtues and advantages of youth, also would appear to be the archetypal wise old man among them. Time will tell, but it's already talking. Levit has that rarest of qualities among musicians, unquantifiable but equally unmistakable: largeness of soul.
His latest CD (Sony) is of the complete Bach Partitas . It seems that just about every musician of consequence is recording Bach these days, but the decidedly untrendy Levit worked on the pieces for three years before taking them to the studio and on the road. If you have to have these supremely challenging pieces on harpsichord, you're in nimble hands (guided by a similarly keen mind) with Christophe Rousset. And if the catalogue were a competition, Levit would be up against some of the finest pianists around, mostly of the brainy type. Judged by any standard, he wins.
As with all the sets of Bach suites, for various instruments and instrument combinations and most often in sets of six, the individual Partitas are strikingly different in character yet have a palpable inner consistency. No other pianist I know can touch Levit's feel for the individual gesture in the larger group movement, and no other pianist I've heard can at the same time keep the Partitas in right relationship with each other. There's an old saw about how the problem with nude dancing is that not everything stops moving at the same time, and something of the same thing happens in these pieces with players who are pianists first and musicians second. With Levit, everything's in dynamic motion all the time but with a single gravitational force, a sun hosting planets hosting moons. Cosmology, not systematic theology.
Consider this: with most pianists in this repertoire, it can be grating to hear more than a single suite at a sitting. There's a Little Engine that Could in Bach that gives his solo music a motoric quality that can be either sustaining or crazy-making. That seemingly ineluctable rhythm, the heavy brocade of ornamentation, can feel like a dentist's drill in the hands of the wrong keyboardist, or even in a sympathetic listener's ear on the wrong day. Nothing jars or slumbers in Levit's Bach.
Before I heard the CDs, I remember Levit's commenting, in an interview, about his special affection for the Sarabande of the First Partita, as good a place as any to check in. Without the slightest bit of romanticizing, the music floats on a cushion of thoughtful reflection that gives it an air of elevation. It's the first point in the set where we encounter serious trills, and the long, drawn-out ones seem just that, not applied from without or above but drawn out of the centers of notes that, in their earlier, unadorned appearances, already wanted to trill. The Partita's concluding Gigue is so supple you might miss that it's wicked hand-over-hand stuff, and the wonder is not only that Levit keeps it all together in a sustained long line, but that the individual gestures, above and below, also emerge in minute gradations of soft and loud, fast and slow that lend each hand its individual profile. It's exuberant, not exhibitionist; cultivated, not calculated joy.
The headlong Second Partita is stretched far tighter but revels in its very elasticity, snapping without inflicting pain. Its Allemande seems to fall out of thin air �" what Claudio Abbado called "the sound of snow falling on snow." The Rondeau has the rhythmic daring and acuity of a Chopin mazurka. The only Partita without a concluding Gigue, it substitutes, as a Capriccio, an elephant ballet that foreshadows Bruckner.
The fugal movements are true as a plumb line. The Fourth's 12-minute Allemande is such rarefied stuff you can hardly talk about it without reference to the unique gas exchanges at those altitudes. His most extreme playing is of the Fourth's Sarabande, probably the single best-known movement in the Partitas, "gentle" music released into real time.
Levit didn't miscalculate by introducing himself with his previous Sony CD set, Beethoven: The Late Piano Sonatas. He's yet to be found on music's Periodic Table of the Elements.
Stay tuned: More on Tchaikovsky's extraordinary final opera, Iolanta, when we get to DG's new live recording. Someone listening to the Met's radio broadcast of the premiere of its new production on Jan. 29, with the same Iolanta, Anna Netrebko, might have been confused by the commotion and booing during her solo curtain call. It was her Met claque shouting down a protestor who climbed onstage to protest the Ukraine stance of the diva and her conductor, Valery Gergiev. A listener from the last Cold War period might have thought it a response to the disastrous condition of her current voice.