It is heartening that pianist Igor Levit should have chosen to call his new double album Life, given that it emerged out of the heavy fug of grief. Levit’s close friend Hannes Malte Mahler, an artist, was killed on his bike in 2016. This album is not only a monument to him but a contemplation – of the continuation of life, of how music is handed down from one generation to another, and of eternity itself.
What it doesn’t do is expect answers. Levit’s choices touch upon the spiritual, but the music is always mixed with the secular: the solemn ritual of the Good Friday Music from Wagner’s Parsifal, reimagined for piano by Liszt and rendered transcendental by Levit’s calm, spacious playing; Bach’s church melodies wrangled by the composer Busoni into a sorrowful Fantasia, a memorial to his father.
Several of the pieces are transcriptions. The music of one composer reworked by another, its meaning passed along by what the sleeve note aptly describes as Chinese whispers – although Brahm’s arrangement of Bach’s violin Chaconne, for left hand only, is more a respectful re-creation. Levit follows this with the “Ghost” Variations by Schumann, the melody in the final variation speaking of consolation even as the accompaniment threatens to overwhelm it. Frederic Rzewski’s contemplative A Mensch is that composer’s own grieving tribute to a friend.
Levit’s affinity for Busoni flowers also in the composer’s uneasy Berceuse and in a tremendous performance of the colossal Fantasia and Fugue on the Chorale Ad Nos, ad Salutarem Undam. His playing is always stacked with purpose, even in music that has no obvious endpoint in sight, and in the latter’s slow movement he creates a seeming suspension of time’s usual rules – something he achieves again in Liszt’s transcription of the Liebestod from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, a quietly radiant performance of extraordinary control.
Finally, the soothing harmonic repetition of Bill Evans’s Peace Piece offers a kind of closure – a change in the intensity of grief, although not the end of it.
This week’s other pick
Twenty-one years ago, Hilary Hahn launched her stellar recording career at the age of 17 with three of JS Bach’s six Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin. Out this week is the completion of that survey, Hilary Hahn Plays Bach, and it’s worth the wait. The vibrancy of Hahn’s tone, weightier now than before, and the way she lets these pieces fall into richly intertwining lines of melody make this new disc a joy from start to finish.
