Igor Levit’s Century of “Encounters” on Sony

from the Amazon.com Web page for the recording being discussed

One week from today Sony Classical will release its latest solo album of performances by pianist Igor Levit. The title of the new album is Encounter, following up on the one-word title of his last album, Life, released in October of 2018. (That release provided the program for a United States tour, which brought Levit to Herbst Theatre for a San Francisco Performances recital on November 1, 2018.) As is usual practice, Amazon.com has created a Web page for processing pre-orders for the new recording.

Most of the two-CD album consists of “encounters” in which one composer reworks music written by a predecessor by transcribing the music for solo piano. The chain of these encounters has been well considered by Levit. He begins with Ferruccio Busoni’s transcriptions of ten chorale chorale preludes that Johann Sebastian Bach had originally composed for organ. The remainder of the first CD then concludes with transcriptions of six more organ chorale preludes composed by Johannes Brahms.

That second set marks the beginning of a “chain” that links to the second CD. At the beginning of that CD, Brahms becomes the object of transcription with Max Reger’s solo piano reworking of Brahms’ Opus 121 set of four “serious” songs. Reger himself is then the next object of transcription with Julian Becker’s solo piano account of “Nachtlied” (night song), the third of eight sacred songs in Reger’s Opus 138 collection. This time the music leads to a different logic of sequencing. The stillness at the conclusion of “Nachtlied” makes a smooth transition into the beginning of Morton Feldman’s “Palais de Mari” (named for a monumental Babylonian structure in what is now Syria). The extended duration (almost half an hour) of Feldman’s composition makes for a radical shift in durational scale, since none of the preceding tracks on both CDs are longer than seven minutes. This was the last piece that Feldman composed for solo piano prior to his death on September 3, 1987.

While the very act of transcription may be viewed as a “dynamic of encounter,” there is an emerging quality of stillness that cuts through the entire recording, culminating in the sustained Zen-like stasis of the Feldman composition. Given that most chorale preludes were composed for periods of silent meditation during church services, almost all of the tracks that lead up to “Palais de Mari” can be approached as preparatory in nature. (There are, of course, exceptions. The BWV 615 “In dir ist Freude” is positively exuberant and is as spirited as the opening of the last of the Brahms Opus 121 songs.) However, the text for the Reger song by Petrus Herbert almost amounts to a secular requiem; and Reger’s homophonic setting clearly evokes Bach’s own homophonic chorale settings.

Taken as a whole, then, the experience of listening to Encounter is one of negotiating an elaborate Web of interconnections, culminating in the subtle interweaving of motifs in “Palais de Mari.” Indeed, the structural detail brings to mind the lecture that Alban Berg prepared prior to the premiere of his Wozzeck opera, which presented the whole three-act opera as an elaborate interconnection of well-crafted component elements. That said, however, it is important to recall how Berg concluded his lecture. He told everyone in the audience to forget about all those details and just come back the following night to enjoy the opera! By the same count, one can easily enjoy the individual moments of Encounter without taking into account how they are connected with other moments.