IIs he already inspired or still exhausted? Anyway, on the poster for No Fear, the documentary about him that’s out now, well-known pianist Igor Levit hangs over the grand piano in a somewhat iconic pose with his forehead touching his notes.
Of course, this is a frozen moment, and quite ambivalent at that, not recognizable as sad or happy. But it stages the 35-year-old, who is now loved by his fans for his open-hearted person as well as for his art, once again as an object of unreserved admiration, even idiocy. Although he acts as if he wants to avoid that.
Regina Schilling is responsible for these slow, finely rhythmically cut two hours of cinema, who most recently made a name for herself with the touchingly sober documentary about “Kulenkampff’s shoes” and all of our television memories of the Seventies, which later won more than just the Grimme Prize Has.
But of course she also has the problem of today’s documentaries with a living object: She doesn’t want to comment and classify. She just wants to show. And when an artist opens up for more than a year, it usually turns out to be a rather uncritical, badly confirming hagiography, the usual “inspiring” portrait of the “extraordinary” artist.
But that’s also because Schilling can’t really decide on a focus. You could have, you started at the end of 2019 and soon slipped into the middle of the pandemic including lockdown, on the 52 house concerts streamed by Igor Levit via Twitter and Instagram without any technical filter in his Berlin music room (there is a book about that).
Or the close male friendship with Andreas Neubronner, the sound engineer he trusts. Or for Levit’s mood of the day, always fluctuating between fear and no fear, as a sometimes doubting, sometimes self-confident artist, as an exhibitionist who is just about introverted and then has to immediately turn every emotion into a Twitter post.
Or Schilling could have just talked to Igor Levit about music and then shown him playing how she excitingly practices it here for nine uncut minutes with the third movement of Beethoven’s Waldstein Sonata.
So it has become something of everything, an imperfect miscellany. And Igor Levit, who has long since evolved and skinned, is back in his usual mix of monk and Madonna of Sorrows. And many of his statements and emotions are not experienced for the first time. Especially since it can be far more complex and multi-faceted than its public images convey.
Almost forgotten classic of the “marble sound”
Fortunately, there are records for that, in addition to the concerts. On his new double album “Tristan” Igor Levit starts off on a happily wrong track. Because if you think of Wagner here, you know of course that there are no original piano works by “Tristan”, only arrangements. Levit plays the arrangement of the first prelude, made by Zoltán Kocsics, who unfortunately died much too early. With it, Levit opens the second part rather soberly, emphasizing the complex harmonies than sinking into oblivion.
After the overture, which also features a quick third love dream by Wagner’s father-in-law Franz Liszt, the main work is an unexpected “Tristan” variation – the more than 50-minute piano-orchestral-tape opus by Hans Werner Henze. In it, Henze coolly, distantly, but with a warm heart, explores the sound world of the famous “Action in Three Acts” in various Préludes in 1973 and reinvents it for himself.
It hasn’t been recorded since today’s technically inadequate first recording. As a live recording with the Gewandhaus Orchestra under Franz Welser-Möst, this has become an urgently needed, delightfully good and confidently successful re-evaluation of this almost forgotten classic of the “marble sound” (Henze).
This album – the somewhat overly dry Adagio of the tenth Mahler symphonies in the arrangement by Ronald Stevenson (of whom Levit recently presented his astonishing “Passacaglia on DSCH”) and Liszt’s delicately pointilistic “Harmonies du Soir” bring it to a close – proves it once again Igor Levit’s double talent as a repertoire truffler and then also as a sovereign interpreter of his finds.
Kept entirely in nocturnal, elegant anthracite, the overall appearance of this quiet, intentionally distanced album also has an effect on the listening impression: as an ascetic, calm exploration of sometimes complex, undercooled, yet simmering passions. And Igor Levit can do that. A lot.
Liszt, Henze, Wagner, Mahler: Tristan (Sony)