At the close of this recital, Wigmore Hall Director John Gilhooly presented Igor Levit with the Wigmore Medal, which recognises musicians whose artistic contribution to the venue and its audience has been especially significant. The pianist has given 42 concerts here since his 2013 debut. The speeches were touching, the audience reception warm, unsurprising given the recital’s excellence.
The programme, all Brahms, comprised all his late solo piano works, every piece in Op.116 to Op.119, in their published order. That 75 minutes of music filled an evening nicely, but the composer cannot have envisaged such a live undertaking, especially given the sameness of mood in many of the items. The music is often described as “valedictory”, “autumnal”, or “resigned”, even the programme notes claiming it as “permeated with forebodings of death”. Really? Yes, there is much quiet slow music, but the markings of a few of the works include the terms agitato, energico and passionato. Not the least of Levit’s achievements was to make this entire sequence of twenty short pieces sound both coherent and consequential.
Op.116’s seven items have a degree of unity based on intervallic and harmonic relationships, the first and last items being tempestuous D minor capriccios, while the third, the Capriccio in G minor functioning as a Scherzo, the consecutive E major and minor intermezzi acting as a slow movement. In allowing only brief pauses between items Levit gave some credence to this idea, but essentially approached each on its own terms, communing with the many slower passages in an absorbed exploratory manner. Paradoxically, this artist can engage an audience by playing as if they are not there. The playing was immaculate, the weighting of chords so exemplary that even soft dissonance had its effect, while there was a strong and precise attack when required.
The Three Intermezzi, Op.117, are mainly slow and p or pp. The composer called them “lullabies of my grief”. Levit’s manner was fastidious and searching, the first intermezzo, the one most like a real lullaby, being given at a tempo a touch slower than might serve to rock a cradle. The ensuing two intermezzi with their greater restlessness were also questing, embracing their prevailing melancholy. There were no false consolations in playing of this calibre, but were these pieces being invested with more gravitas than they could bear?
All such doubts were banished by the splendid second half, when the music was allowed to speak for itself rather more. The six numbers in the Klavierstücke, Op.118, seemed to be given in one great curve, opening with full recognition of that molto appassionato marking of the A minor intermezzo, rolling back the years to the stirring romantic flair of the younger composer. The great G minor ballade was similarly fuelled by the fire and rhythmic verve of Brahms’ early career, and the exquisite Romance in F major rose to a persuasively rhetorical climax.
The four Klavierstücke, Op.119, begin with another intermezzo which, in a letter to Clara Schumann, Brahms described as “teeming with dissonances”, “exceptionally melancholic”, adding “every bar and every note must sound like a ritardando, as if one wanted to suck melancholy out of each and every one”. The intensity of Levit’s playing suggested he knew and heeded this advice. But in the buoyant Intermezzo in C major, the lightest of all these pieces, the pianist kept the music delightfully airborne.
The audience clamoured for more, but the award presentation now occupied the space for an encore. But in a programme of familiar pieces between two and five minutes long, the soloist had already played twenty encores.
