Igor Levit’s Latest Single-Word-Title Album

Igor Levit on the cover of his latest album (courtesy of Jensen Artists)

This Friday Sony Classical will release its seventh solo album featuring the prodigious Berlin-based pianist Igor Levit. Levit began his recording career with Sony with “usual suspects” albums focusing on Ludwig van Beethoven and Johann Sebastian Bach. The third album then brought together both of these composers with their best-known approaches to composing variations, Bach’s BWV 988 (“Goldberg”) variations, and Beethoven’s Opus 120 set of 33 variations composed on the waltz theme given to him by the publisher Anton Diabelli. He then decided that these “monuments” of variations form deserved a more recent “companion,” so he added to the mix a performance of Frederic Rzewski’s 36 variations on the Chilean song “¡El pueblo unido jamás será vencido!” (the people united will never be defeated).

His interest in Rzewski opened a door to a more adventurous approach to repertoire. This included two albums with single-word titles. The first of these, Life, included a shorter Rzewski selection, mixed together with a generous serving of Franz Liszt and Ferruccio Busoni, offering a more than generous share of Sturm und Drang but capped off with the serenity of Bill Evans’ “Peace Piece.” Busoni then returns in the next album, Encounter, with arrangements of chorale preludes by both Bach and Johannes Brahms, selections both composed and arranged by Max Reger, and, as the final “punch line,” Morton Feldman’s half-hour piano solo “Palais de Mari.”

This Friday’s release will be the third album with a single word title: Tristan. As most readers will expect, Amazon.com has created Web pages for pre-ordering both the CD and MP3 versions of this album. The good news about the latter is that it includes the PDF version of the booklet that accompanies the CD.

Those that know the operas of Richard Wagner (or their Celtic legends) will probably recognize that the single proper noun “Tristan” can be unfolded into two common nouns, “love” and “death.” Levit explores these nouns in ways that would probably have motivated Spock to raise his eyebrow. Since Wagner composed very little for piano, Levit chose to begin with one of Wagner’s friends, whose own compositions tended to show off his qualities as a piano virtuoso. That was Franz Liszt; and the opening selection is the last of the three solo piano compositions given the title “Liebestraum” (dream of love).

All three of those pieces were originally conceived as song settings of poems by Ludwig Uhland and Ferdinand Freiligrath. The third “Liebestraum” draws upon the following strophe (as translated into English):

Oh, love as long as you can love!

Oh, love as long as you could crave!

That hour is fast approaching when

You’ll stand and weep beside the grave!

So begins Levit’s coupling of love and death!

The coupling is subsequently pursued through a conjunction of music by Wagner and Gustav Mahler. The prelude to Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde introduces the listener to music that depicts the love between these two protagonists. Levit presents this music by performing Zoltán Kocsis’ arrangement of Wagner’s music for solo piano.

This is then followed by Ronald Stevenson’s arrangement for piano of the first (Adagio) movement of Gustav Mahler’s tenth symphony. Mahler never completed this symphony. However, on the final page of the final movement, he wrote “für dich leben! für dich sterben!” (to live for you; to die for you), followed by “Almschi!,” using his pet name for his wife Alma as the “second person” of the preceding phrase. One of the ways in which Mahler may have embodied those words in his music can be found in the first movement, whose climax involves a chord consisting of all twelve chromatic pitches distributed across the different instruments of the orchestra. One might say that Mahler decided to face death with dissonance. There is no questioning the intensity of Mahler’s rhetoric, but I have to confess that no solo piano arrangement can really do justice to how Mahler chose to express that intensity.

Tristan is also the title of a collection of six preludes scored for piano, electronic tapes, and orchestra composed by Hans Werner Henze. On this recording Levit performs with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra conducted by Franz Welser-Möst. I have to confess that my impressions of Henze have been highly variable; but this is probably due, in no small part, to the extremely modest number of occasions I have had to listen to his music. On the one hand he seems to have been very comfortable composing music for guitar. However, when given the resources of a full orchestra, he almost always “pulls out all the stops.”

When Christian Reif made his debut as Wattis Foundation Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra, he began the program with an instrumental excerpt from Henze’s one-act opera “The Bassarids.” The excerpt was only four minutes long; but the decibels were decidedly “over the top.” Nevertheless, when I wrote about this performance, I made it a point to declare, “Reif expertly balanced his resources allowing the listener to appreciate Henze’s well-calculated sense of the interplay of rhythms and themes.” In other words Reif knew exactly how to get the most out of those four minutes of music.

Tristan, on the other hand, is about 40 minutes long. The music is not so much “over the top” as it is “everything but the kitchen sink.” Needless to say, Wagner is part of the mix with music that involves death, rather than love. However, Welser-Möst never seems to find instrumental gestures that will guide the attentive listener along a coherent path that links together the composer’s six preludes.

On the other hand, the album, when taken as a whole, leads the attentive listener to a satisfying conclusion. The “program” concludes, as it began, with a solo piano composition by Liszt. The selection is “Harmonies du soir” (harmonies of the evening), the penultimate of the twelve “transcendental” études. This presents a “nocturnal rhetoric” that “transcends” the inevitability of both love and death. For all of the complex finger-work that Liszt created for this étude, in Levit’s setting the music brings a calming closure to the harrowing journey established by the preceding selections.