Shock tactics | 30 May 2019

Igor Levit has rapidly achieved cult status, as he certainly deserves. He has already reached the stage where he can programme enormous and pretty obscure works, such as Ronald Stevenson’s Passacaglia. Clearly, Levit’s taste runs to large-scale works, but his recently released disc, Life, shows his command of shorter pieces too.

His first concert in this run of three was Bach’s Goldberg Variations, a performance that commanded an instant hush and was greeted with almost unseemly cheering and stamping from the Wigmore audience. Levit began this masterpiece in a remarkably quiet way, almost casually, but with an amazing singing tone. Indeed, except for the punctuating rigorous canons, he cultivated cantabile throughout, his journey into the depths of this fathomless work being as different as possible from either of Glenn Gould’s recordings, long the gold standard for the Goldbergs. Performances of this work do tend towards the dogmatic, as I find with Andras Schiff, whom Levit admires.

For most of his performance Levit offered us the chance to respond as we liked, and it was only about halfway through that the intensity of his vision of the whole work gathered us for his transcendental treatment of its ultimate reaches. He imposed a lengthy silence before the 25th variation, the so-called ‘black pearl’, and drew it out to heavenly lengths. Then there was the fantastic progression to the thrilling virtuosity of the last variations, with the wonderfully rowdy ‘Quodlibet’ — Bach bringing us down to earth — before the repeat (with repeats) of the theme. That was an evening that one couldn’t forget.

Two evenings later it was a longer concert, with Beethoven’s Diabelli variations in the first half. It was — one can take it for granted — a captivating, individual and mischievous account, but I felt, as I did with the CD set of the same works, that Levit is more at home with the serenities of Bach than the combativeness of Beethoven, despite his deeply held radical political views.