Dhe piano, with its five hundred year history from the organ pioneers of the Renaissance to Bach and the virtuosos of the nineteenth century to the present day, still exerts an unbroken power of fascination. There is hardly any other explanation for the fact that two new piano festivals have been launched in Lucerne in quick succession, both with success: in February “Le Piano Symphonique”, performed by the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra and with an illustrious group of guest soloists, and now this “Klavierfest”, a seasonal offshoot of the Lucerne Festival. It is curated by Igor Levit, who, as a regular guest at the summer festival, has found a loyal following here. His four-day meeting of pianists brought a colorful mix of the known and the unknown, played solo or in a duo with performers from his circle of friends and students. His endeavor to open the supposedly elitist concert ritual to everyday life was consistently recognizable. Or “to break out”, as a popular catchphrase of the 1960s avant-garde goes.
Four decades ago, Friedrich Gulda also demonstrated in the “Munich Piano Summer” how this departure works. When the vivacious Viennese with his hippie hat and the fat watch on his wrist sat down at the grand piano, played enchanting Mozart and then improvised for an hour together with Chick Corea and Nicolas Economou, the barriers between musician and listener were torn down in no time. Gulda’s uncomplicated, heart-opening address to the audience played a decisive part in this.
Igor Levit’s body language works
Levit, the communicator and influencer hardened by social media, on the other hand, surprisingly seems rather inhibited in verbal communication. He knows how to use body language all the more purposefully. And that works. The audience lies at his feet and reacts to every demonstrative hand movement, for example when he adjusts the piano chair, with enthusiastic murmurs. The adoration of the soloist as a magician and genius is transformed into an exuberant sympathy for an artist who, with performative understatement, creates a new, lighter tone in the concert hall.
But Levit is not a dogmatist and also had the Russian pianist Anna Vinnitskaya perform in a traditional recital. She began with the rarely heard piano version of the organ piece “Prélude, fugue et variation” op. 18 by César Franck and then shone in Alexander Scriabin’s fifth sonata and in “La Valse” by Maurice Ravel with a grandiosely developed pianism – a highlight in this piano festival .
Despite his tongue-in-cheek not wanting to be elitist, Levit didn’t make it easy for the audience. In his solo evening he seemed to want to demonstratively shake off the image of the cool, fast and straightforward player, which he had reinforced the day before in a duo with Alexei Volodin with Mozart’s Sonata in D major KV 448. He began in a deeply reflective manner with Brahms’ Four Serious Songs, arranged for piano by Max Reger, and then continued the tone in the piano version of the first movement of Gustav Mahler’s unfinished Tenth Symphony. The very long Adagio, which already radiates inner turmoil, sadness and sheer despair in the orchestral version, is even more disturbing in the bareness of the piano writing. It’s to his credit that Levit took on this hard-to-digest piece.
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