Cycles of Beethoven’s piano sonatas are not such rare events, at least in London’s halls, but they always have an imposing air. They remain, essentially, the most ambitious thing a player can undertake, a test not only of skill and stamina, but also, profoundly, of imagination. Interpretative challenges proliferate madly; each sonata is different and a sense of an acute intelligence (the acutest!) at work in purely musical terms is inescapable at every moment — daunting to the performer, if merely exhilarating to the listener.
The young Russian-German Igor Levit is halfway through his season-long Wigmore Hall cycle, and is a pianist apparently undaunted by anything. He has grouped the pieces in eight recitals, not in chronological order — though he began in September with No 1 and finishes in June with the last three — but in a musically satisfying one; and the two I’ve attended so far even hinted at key relationships between works.
In the inaugural concert, he followed the F minor first work, Op 2, No 1 — given a realisation of concentrated brilliance, sublime unfussiness, that immediately suggested a Beethovenian strength — with a sonata in that key’s relative major, the A flat, Op 26. After the interval, the modest-scaled G major, Op 79, acted as a “dominant” preparation for the grand C major (Waldstein) sonata, Op 53, its opening allegro taken at great but effective speed, its adagio molto deeply touched by “vox humana” bass tone.
The fourth recital’s second half offered a dramatic juxtaposition of C major and minor sonatas. The expansive Op 2, No 3, was dispatched with marvellous dexterity, and Op 13 in C minor, the Pathétique, the epitome of musical overfamiliarity, appeared in arrestingly freshened colours. Earlier, the B flat, Op 22 sonata, done with compelling flair, followed the three-movement D minor work, Op 31, No 2, nicknamed, if unconvincingly, The Tempest. Levit seemed keen to reinforce any Shakespearean connection by making the first movement’s unusual recitatives as disembodied, Ariel-like, as possible while fiercely emphasising the stormy passages. The reading verged on mannerism, but Beethoven’s aesthetic is uniquely adapted to severe and even bizarre contrasts. No encore(s) — Levit is eminently free from fuss. The encore will be the next batch, on January 30.
At the Barbican, there were bold if modestly attended programmes on consecutive days. First, the BBC SO under Jukka-Pekka Saraste gave the premiere of Diana Burrell’s Concerto for Brass and Orchestra, proceeding ornithologically to Haydn’s Symphony No 83 in G minor, known as The Hen, and Stravinsky’s The Firebird. Both accounts were fine and spirited; the second, with its large forces, including three harps and off-stage brass, a properly sumptuous affair.
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Brass-section interest was the official theme of Burrell’s vigorously accomplished three-movement essay: those instruments registered themselves idiomatically again and again, yet this could almost have been a concerto for cimbalom (played by Edward Cervenka). Tuned percussion were hardly less prominent than brass, serving happily as a balance or even antidote to excessive sharp sonority and rhythmic snappery. There was radiant string close harmony, too, as a further timbral contrast — set against splendid solos for brass principals in the central slow movement, and lending it (or confirming) a certain English feel.
The LSO was conducted by John Adams in the second of two programmes marking his 70th birthday. He gave us Bartok’s Hungarian Sketches, Stravinsky’s ballet Orpheus — an ultra-refined piece that always sounds wonderfully if constitutively strange — and revisited his violin concerto, or Berliozian “dramatic symphony”, Scheherazade.2, whose British premiere with this orchestra and soloist, Leila Josefowicz, he directed here 14 months ago. Impressed then by the huge score’s sheer prodigality of notes, and their tireless (memorised) rendition by the physically intense Josefowicz, I now, alas, found the relentless outpourings wearying and synthetic, almost as if computer-generated. Unlike the Burrell concerto, with which it shares a use of the cimbalom, Adams’s never seems to involve real emotions.