Last night in Davies Symphony Hall, pianist Igor Levit concluded his tenure as San Francisco Symphony (SFS) Artist-in-Residence with a solo recital that concluded this season’s Great Performers Series. The first half of his program consisted of a coupling of two collections of relatively short pieces. The first of these was a selections of six chorale preludes that Johannes Brahms had composed for organ, arranged for solo piano by Ferruccio Busoni. This early twentieth-century arrangement was coupled with Fred Hersch’s second “book” of a collection entitled Songs Without Words, composed in 2022.
The second half of the program began much later in the twentieth century with Zoltán Kocsis’ 1978 arrangement for solo piano of the opening prelude to Richard Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde. This was followed by Franz Liszt’s B minor piano sonata, composed about half a decade before Wagner’s opera. Levit’s one encore selection continued this “reverse traversal” of the nineteenth century with a performance of the third of the D. 780 collection of six solo piano compositions given the overall title Moments musicaux by composer Franz Schubert.
Over the course of his SFS visit, Levit traversed a repertoire that was as highly imaginative as it was extensive. He had begun his visit with the most conventional of his offerings, Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 73 (fifth) piano concerto in the key of E-flat major, often known as the “Emperor.” His Liszt selection, coupled with its encore, presented a return to this domain of familiar repertoire. Mind you, the Liszt sonata can be an unwieldy beast; and too many pianists present it simply for the sake of letting the audience know how skillfully they can jump through all of the composer’s fiery hoops.
In that context Levit should be credited for trying to present the score as music, rather than some kind of Olympic challenge. He provided one of the clearer accounts of how this single-movement composition can be parsed into a sequence of episodes that constitute a coherent narrative. This established the encore as a perfect context, contrasting Liszt with a composer who, in the spirit of Buckminster Fuller, knew how to make “more and more with less and less” in his cycles of short pieces.
On the other side of the sonata, so to speak, Levit introduced the second half of the program with a composer that excelled in making more and more with more and more. The Tristan prelude is a perfect example unfolding a rich repertoire of themes couched in a series of harmonic progressions that never (even in the final measure) establish a sense of finality. (Mind you, this is a prelude to an opera with a very long first act!) What struck me as important, however, had more to do with the way in which Levit could negotiate the dynamics to reflect on the original orchestral version than with how Kocsis had telescoped Wagner’s score down to the resources of a single keyboard.
In the first half of the program, I was particularly drawn to how easily Hersch could shift away from jazz piano gigs into a more formal recital setting. As his notes explained, his Songs Without Words compositions were “written out completely,” in contrast to the usual jazz “charts.” Each of the six short pieces was endowed with its own distinctive “personality” in Levit’s interpretation; and I have to say that I was delighted with the freshness Hersch brought to a genre usually associated with the nineteenth century.
Cover of Levit’s album that couples chorale preludes by Johann Sebastian Bach and Johannes Brahms (from the album’s Amazon.com Web page)
I was equally struck by how the entire program had been framed with Brahms at the beginning the Liszt at the conclusion. Busoni’s arrangements of Brahms’ organ music were as perceptive of those he had composed based on the organ chorales of Johann Sebastian Bach. Some readers probably know that I have been writing about Levit’s recordings for some time; and, in the collection I have accumulated, I particularly liked how he had the chorale preludes of Bach and Brahms reflect each other in his Encounter album. Levit seems to believe that, where sacred music is concerned, Brahms deserves just as much attention as Bach; and last night I was particularly delighted with the case he made for Brahms.
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