“Fantasia” – new album by Igor Levitt: Training at Altitude | CDs | BR Classic

Again, a very big piece: on his new album Fantasia, Igor Levitt climbs the piano-playing Himalayas, the four peaks in this case being Bach, Liszt, Busoni, and Berg. This is sometimes exhausting, often exciting and, above all, offers stunning views.

Igor Levitt calls his new double album Fantasia, and the collection of four landmark works of piano literature also has something fascinating about it. The mixture of Bach’s chromatic fantasy and fugue, Liszt’s B minor Sonata, Alban Berg’s sonata, and Busoni’s massive contrapuntistica can be described as a bit inflationary, or at least too ambitious.

Musical Himalayas again

A meeting of the giants, even if Bach and Berg only lasted about ten minutes. Lawet needs the eight thousand, but he always chooses them very carefully. His journeys in the history of music resemble glacial tours and expeditions to icy highlands. Forced marches for the pianist, but also not without effort for the audience. However, each of these trips is very exciting.

The four works are separated by centuries. What they have in common is a carefully calculated combination of awareness of form and compositional freedom. Regardless of whether it is Bach, Liszt, Berg, or Busoni, no note can be written differently. However, never feel that formal requirements have been met here. Form and freedom combine perfectly.

Modern is better than romantic

Cover of “Fantasia” | Image source: Sony Classic

Igor Levitt measures the hour and a half these four works take with incredible confidence. Bach’s tonal imagination sounds incredibly clear and fantastically creative. In Liszt’s B minor Sonata, Levitt was more interested in the wild and far-reaching side of modernism. The poetic moments never feel too great, but they’re certainly not overly romantic, which is good for business in my opinion. There is enough romanticism in Liszt anyway.

Alban Berg’s Opus 1 is one of the works that foreshadows Liszt’s B minor Sonata. Deeply rooted in Romanticism and formally associated with classical music, Berg’s one-movement sonata tells of a new world, Stefan George breathing “air from another planet.” In its combination of formal rigor and profound expression, this is a real achievement for a twenty-three-year-old – and therefore exactly the right thing for Wyvit.

Levitt adores Busoni and plays him fantastically

With Ferruccio Busoni’s “Fantasia,” a great tribute to Johann Sebastian Bach, Levitt closes the circle. This attempt, made in 1910, to complete the last remaining fugue from Bach’s Art of Fugue, in itself has something utopianly open and incomplete about it. Igor Levitt truly admires Busoni, one of the most exciting artists of the early twentieth century. What Levitt does with the giant “Fantasia Contrappuntistica” is breathtaking in its transparency, precise tonal blending, seriousness and intellectual penetration. It’s hard to get enough of this masterpiece anyway. The adequate interpretation of Leviticus makes this impossible.

Broadcast: “Piazza” on September 30 from 8:05 AM on BR-KLASSIK