Levit’s explorative Brahms provides the highlight at Carnegie
There’s a hoary cliché from rock journalism, where a guitarist is giving an interview and talks about how they dislike certain other players because they have great technique but no “feel.” While a cliché it makes sense in that there’s a logic to it, and some true examples, but it also misses the essential point that the more technique a musician has, the more they can express, the more feel they have. As long as they have something to say, of course.
That brings one to pianist Igor Levit’s performance at Carnegie Hall on Sunday afternoon. Levit is one of the great contemporary pianists, with incredible technique and also supreme artistry. Playing Bach, Brahms, and Beethoven, he showed off both qualities, though not always together.
The technique came immediately with the opening flourish of Bach’s Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue in D minor, BWV 903. The speed and articulation of Levit’s playing was thrilling and also explosively expressive. The way he hurled himself into each line, often with a brief pause to make of the start of a new one, made it sound as if he were thinking them up on the spot. Even with this familiar music, there was tremendous tension and surprise; it felt like running out of control down a hill but trusting in a safe landing.
Levit finished the first half with Brahms, the Op. 10 Ballades, which were exquisite. The pianist laid them out carefully, seeming to examine them for hidden crevices and secret messages. Though his pace was deliberate, even in the third, Intermezzo, and the quicker passages of each of the others, there was a consistent forward flow, like the gentle lapping of waves.
The same deliberateness underlined each articulation and phrase, Levit presenting them and setting them in place. Instead of using them as a passing device, he lingered on dissonances. This felt genuine and wise, a window into Brahms’ deepest thoughts with weight put on the most lyrical parts of the Ballades. The brighter and more rhythmically spry passages felt stark and angular, like a framework for the more meditative expressions. The effect was marvelous and a bit uncanny and was a superb demonstration of how unobtrusive technique—a steady hand and clear, varying touch—is fundamental to creating feeling in music. Slow, but not too slow, quiet, played as if the music was the simplest thing imaginable, this was great artistry.
The second half was all technique in the most obvious sense, and while there was interest to the athleticism of Levit’s playing, and the audience was thrilled, there was little in the way of feeling. The problem was Levit’s choice to play Franz Liszt’s piano arrangement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7.
The Liszt transcriptions have great musicological value in how they show Beethoven’s structural techniques, but can make for poor concert experiences. Beethoven’s Seventh was composed for the orchestra because, as the performance showed, things like the sustained strings and woodwind colors are necessary to build the harmonic tension in the long introduction, and the rude blaring of the horn in the first and third movements connect to the composer’s historical and social setting.
The Allegretto had a restful delicacy, but absent things like the low strings was confined to a narrow emotional range. The third and fourth movements are so dense with activity that replacing the orchestral colors with the monochromatic piano sound turned them into little more than a physical test of stamina and force. This was exhausting and eventually dulling to hear.
This was also not Levit at his best. Turning the music into something all about chops meant that mistakes ordinarily meaningless when striving for feeling become consequential, and his playing was often sloppy, especially in the first and third movements. Both technique and expression were subpar.
After a long, rapturous ovation, Levit returned to deep artistry with his encore. Dedicated to the people of Los Angeles—and he encouraged the audience to donate to those in need amid the destruction—it was Busoni’s arrangement of Bach’s Choral Prelude in A. It was moving, played with beautiful simplicity, gentleness, and deep, luminous feeling.
Nobuyuki Tsujii plays Beethoven, Liszt, and Chopin, 8 p.m. Friday, March 21 carnegiehall.org
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