Igor Levit tackles symphonic transcriptions at Carnegie Hall

Prodigious pianist Igor Levit appears to have a penchant for drawing attention to intellectually and technically challenging works at the fringes of the repertoire in his well-thought and provocative recital programmes. Amidst the darkest days of the Covid epidemic, he included some of these pieces into his famed live Twitter “house concerts”. In the same vein, on Thursday, he anchored his Carnegie Hall recital with piano transcriptions of symphonic music by Beethoven and Mahler.

He began the evening with Paul Hindemith’s relatively brief Suite “1922”, a work that qualified the performance for inclusion in the hall's current festival dedicated to music created during the Weimar Republic. The suite was composed during a period when Hindemith sought to forge his own path, striving to evade the influences of Brahms and Reger by embracing Dada, jazz and expressionism. However, he would later disavow the work, referring to it as a “sin of youth”.

Today, the five pieces have mostly lost their shock value. While Marsch, Ragtime or the outer sections of Shimmy treat the piano as a rambunctious percussion instrument, moments of melancholy are not limited to the central Nachtstück, which is the piece closest to Hindemith’s mature style. In Levit’s interpretation, the music seemed to gain other valences beyond the immediately perceptible. Dance tunes and rhythms, handled with irony, could quickly acquire a frenetic, even menacing character.

The 2010 transcription of the Adagio from Mahler’s unfinished Tenth Symphony is credited to the Scottish pianist, composer and educator Ronald Stevenson, who studied facsimiles of Mahler’s primary materials in his endeavour. Stripping away the orchestral veneer and timbral richness made the music sound even more anguished than the original score. Accepting the piano’s evident inability to convey the full range of sounds that a large ensemble of instruments can produce – the expansive string playing, the brass chorale and the piercing solo trumpet – Levit didn’t shy away from emphasising the dissonances and the music’s unbridled modernism. He imbued the slow-paced last part with incredible tension.

If Mahler’s Adagio, as transfigured by Stevenson, aims to distil the essence from an already minimalistic orchestral tapestry, Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony in Franz Liszt’s piano transcription is all about preserving, and occasionally even enhancing, the complexity of the symphonic writing through a single instrument and just two hands. The result, like many other Lisztian transcriptions, bears the unmistakable hallmark of a great composer. In his quest to capture the force of the original, Liszt invented tremendously demanding fingering, omitted supporting lines that he could not fit, while moving others around. He ingeniously found alternative textures for passages that are highly playable for strings, but awkward for the piano. Levit handled the maelstrom with his forbidding power of concentration, not to mention his amazing technique. The Marcia funebre conveyed profound grief, while the Scherzo sparkled with lightness and vitality. Unafraid to liberally use the pedal to maintain tension, big chords varied in weight while contrapuntal lines kept their contour intact. Every little detail was perfectly fit and never rushed in a narrative traversed with controlled passion. 

The encore, Brahms’ Intermezzo Op.117 no.1, was airy and delicate, in stark contrast to the Eroica's Finale, which brimmed with Romantic élan and self-confidence. These two very different E flat major outcomes were given shape by a singular pianist who seems to inhabit a world of his own while on stage. Being allowed a glimpse into his inner soul’s workings was a great privilege.