Igor Levit

He loves espresso, listens to Chopin at the gym, and tweets firm opinions on politics and culture. He’s explored the limits of artistic freedom together with the German pop singer “Danger Dan” on Jan Böhmermann’s satirical German TV show Magazin Royale, he’s been a delegate to the German Federal Convention, and he inspired many with his “house concerts” during the pandemic. Igor Levit is a dazzling pianist and a phenomenon. But when he speaks about music, his frame of reference is universal: “It’s there the moment it sounds. You hear it, I hear it, I play it, you experience it. And then it’s over, and you’ve got nothing to hold on to. Just your experience of it. And that’s luxury to me”.

Levit’s recording of Ludwig van Beethoven’s final piano sonatas made him an international star in 2013. Already when Beethoven composed them, back in the 1820s, they outshone everything else for the piano. Franz Schubert also felt their impact: in 1828, despite suffering from poor health, he worked unceasingly to complete his Piano Sonata No. 21 in B-flat major – a lyrical work with moments of both serene religiosity and dance-like grace that gave rise to the hope that Schubert might establish himself as a successor to Beethoven. But two months later, Schubert died at the age of just 31. This work in B-flat major thus became his final piano sonata, though it was not published until over a decade later, when the dominance of Beethoven, who had died in 1827, was no longer quite so omnipresent.

In 1839, at roughly the same time that Schubert’s Piano Sonata in B-flat major was being published, Robert Schumann wrote his Nachtstücke op. 23, a cycle of occasionally gloomy “night pieces” for piano based on the eponymous set of tales by E.T.A Hoffmann. This cycle also has its own connection to death, for after having completed the first piece, which Schumann unknowingly labelled a “funeral march” and described as a “fantasy about a corpse”, he learnt of the sudden decease of his brother Eduard. The other three pieces, however, with their capricious, blustering moments and chorale-like elements, pursue other aspects of the tales from Hoffmann. Levit will also bring one more final piano sonata to Andermatt: Frédéric Chopin’s Piano Sonata No. 3, a “concerto without orchestra”, which was composed five years before its composer’s death, and was his last essay in the genre.