This year’s Gilmore Award winner, Igor Levit, played an astonishing solo concert of late Beethoven sonatas to a sold-out crowd at Kalamazoo College’s Stetson Chapel Wednesday afternoon, surpassing all expectations of seriousness and excellence.
The program was a last-minute change from previously scheduled Bach’s Goldberg Variations, the masterpiece Levit famously performed on a turntable platform at the Park Avenue Armory, but only after audience members relinquished their cell phones and sat in noise-cancelling headphones-induced silence for 30 minutes. Levit doesn’t play around.
Known as a Beethoven specialist, Levit audaciously began his recording career with this group of late Beethoven sonatas composed in the 1820s, and to experience his poise and mastery of these demanding, abstract compositions live was stunning, even without the preparation of pure silence directly preceding his exquisite playing.
Beginning with Sonata in E Major, No. 30, Op. 109, Levit’s performance was impassioned from the moment his fingers touched the keys. With a quick opening followed by slow sections, this rhapsodic, free-form series of movements showed off Levit’s physicality. When he played pianissimo, he leaned over the piano with face to keys as if in a whisper, and then leaned back with a bounce when fortissimo with wonderful dramatic extremes.
At times he played bright, vivacious staccato notes with terrific speed and agility, then he slowed down, sweetly, as the music demanded, only to build boldly and return gently to the primary theme. With such twists and turns in unbalanced movements, Levit’s emotionality was gripping throughout both subtle and intense shifts in mood and tempo.
In Sonata in A-flat Major, No. 31, Op. 110, Levit highlighted its abrupt harmonic changes with little explosions of joyful flourish.
In a talk before the performance, Musicologist Dr. Zaide Pixley, Kalamazoo College Professor Emerita and Gilmore Festival board member, described the finale, Beethoven’s Sonata in C Minor, No. 32, Op. 111, as “truly transcendent.” With only two movements, it begins with a French overture “punched up almost like a fugue,” she said; and written in perhaps the most tragic and dramatic key, its intensity is breathtaking.
Like a storm, Levit built to a deep tremble of the left hand, and big dark notes gave way to a lighter dance of the right hand, as if his hands were in conversation that sparked wild and spontaneous applause from the grateful audience.
At one point the piano sounded like a mystic waterfall and then little sparkling raindrops. Shortly thereafter, a bright ray of sun beamed through the tall west windows of the chapel illuminating Levit, as if divine lighting design materialized to emphasize just how magnificently he shines in the spotlight.
Igor Levit
Stetson Chapel
May 9
thegilmore.org
