For those of us in the Bay Area who care about classical music, the last two weeks have mainly been taken up with Igor Levit’s residency at the San Francisco Symphony. I wrote about this marvelous pianist last fall, after hearing him perform all twenty-four of Shostakovich’s preludes and fugues in one Carnegie evening, and if you’ve read that wildly enthusiastic post, you’ll be unsurprised to learn how eagerly I attended all four of the concerts he gave at San Francisco’s Davies Hall.
The first, and in some ways the most straightforwardly delightful, was a Friday night concert in which Esa-Pekka Salonen (who is himself a great and ongoing gift to the San Francisco Symphony) conducted two Beethoven pieces: the Piano Concerto No. 5, in which Igor Levit was the soloist, and the much-loved Eroica symphony, No. 3. The piano concerto came first, and Levit’s mastery of the music was a pleasure to behold. Playing without a score, he seemed especially alert to what the other musicians were doing and feeling, so that his interactions with the orchestra were both seamless and communicative. As for his own solo passages, they ranged from the delicately near-silent to the thrillingly emphatic—never in an idiosyncratic or perverse way, but in a manner that seemed utterly suited to Beethoven’s intentions. Even Levit’s bodily gestures (his turns of the head to look around, his relaxed way of keeping the rhythm with hands, arms, and even legs) suggested that this collaboration was a pleasure to him as well as to his fellow performers. Afterwards, and just before the intermission, he responded to the audience’s repeated ovations by giving us a lovely little encore of uncharacteristically tuneful Shostakovich (the Waltz Scherzo, as it turned out, from the Ballet Suite No. 1). So by the time we got to the program’s second half, even the beautifully played Eroica symphony felt a bit like elegant wallpaper: that is, something you were glad to have surrounding you, but not a revelation in the same way Levit’s Emperor concerto was.
That Sunday I went back to hear Levit in a chamber music concert, in which he joined several string players from the San Francisco Symphony in a well-thought-out program. I was shocked by how poorly attended it was, compared to the Beethoven — but then, chamber music almost always draws a smaller crowd than symphonies, and since Davies sadly lacks a chamber-music auditorium, the SFS is forced to hold these more intimate concerts in the large hall. In the event, the concert was just as rewarding as the Friday night had been, with three unusual string pieces (Frank Bridge’s 1912 Lament, and Mark O’Connor’s Appalachia Waltz and Emily’s Reel from the 1990s) played by Symphony musicians. This turned out to be the perfect set-up for Shostakovich’s Piano Quintet in G minor, which formed the second half of the concert. I have loved this piece since the very first time I heard it (with Anne-Marie McDermott at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, almost twenty years ago), and it was even better this time, in Levit’s gracefully collaborative, distinctly enunciated performance. In a way that is not at all easy to do, the pianist managed to capture both Shostakovich’s appealing wit and the composer’s dark-tinged anxiety (the concerto dates from 1940, shortly after Stalin’s terrifying critique of Shostakovich, and just at the beginning of the war). Of the four SFS musicians who accompanied Levit in this adventure, Melissa Kleinbart on the first violin and Amos Yang on the cello were particular standouts, though all four were really good.
Then, on the following Saturday. it was time for the big event: Ferruccio Busoni’s Piano Concerto in C major, which Igor Levit, with Salonen’s help and support, had dredged up from the archives and brought to life again. Busoni, who lived from 1866 to 1924, was an Italian who settled for much of his life in Berlin. (I have actually seen the plaque on the house where he lived in Viktoria-Luisa-Platz, the same building Billy Wilder was to occupy a few years after Busoni’s death.) It took him three years, from 1901 to 1904, to write his Opus 39: a fiendish piano concerto, seventy-five minutes long, with a piano part so fast and complicated that few people have ever been able to play it.
This concerto, I have to say, is one of the weirdest things I’ve ever heard. Five movements long, it ends with a choral passage in German, sung by a male chorus and apparently representing “mysticism in nature.” But even before then it does not sound anything like your usual piano concerto. The speed at which Levit had to play his assigned notes was so extreme that his page-turner (whom he needed in this case to handle the paper score) often had to get out of his seat every minute or so to turn the page. The music was incredibly loud at times, and with the combination of drums from the orchestra and repeated pounding chords on the piano, it was also incredibly percussive. Which is not to say that it lacked melody: there were sustained harmonious passages that, while not exactly hummable, evoked a sense of something tunefully familiar. These could never be pinned down, though, because as soon as Busoni had accomplished one new thing with the orchestra and the piano, he was on to the next. If I had simply heard it without being prepared in any way, I would not have been able to say whether this concerto was composed in 1812, 2012, or somewhere in between; the musical forms it drew on could have arisen any time in those two centuries, but they were not forms I have heard from anyone else. The whole piece struck me as a genetic “sport”—an evolutionary dead end, a one-of-a-kind development that took things as far as they could go and left nothing for followers to do. Given the difficulty of the piano’s role (and, I imagine, even the orchestra’s), it was no surprise to find that the work has lain fallow for most of the many decades since its composition. Still, in Levit’s hands it was continually exciting—not for a single second was I bored—and we in the audience all felt privileged to witness its revival, even if we did not always know what to make of it.
I thought fondly back to the Busoni evening as I listened to the fourth concert in Levit’s series, a recital that began with Brahms’s Six Choral Preludes and ended with Liszt’s Piano Sonata in B minor, with pieces by jazz pianist Fred Hersch and a piano adaptation of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde Prelude in between. There was a connection between the two concerts, not just in the fact that Busoni had arranged the Brahms, but also in the semi-Wagnerian adventurousness that I only now realized I had heard in the Busoni. But the Liszt, for me, was a trial: lots of virtuosity, lots of heavy emphasis alternating with hesitant thoughtfulness on the piano keys, but with none of the payback that had been afforded in the case of Beethoven, Shostakovich, and (to a lesser extent) Busoni.
It was a rather odd way for Levit to choose to end what had been an eye-opening, utterly thrilling residency. But I was clearly in the minority in my reaction, because the crowd that attended Tuesday’s recital once again roared to its feet at the concert’s end, just as it had for the Beethoven and the Busoni. That avidly applauding, bravo-screaming San Francisco audience seemed, in a way, like a slavering beast—as if Igor Levit were a delicious morsel meant to feed his fans’ all-consuming hunger, if only they could get close enough to swallow him. I found it almost frightening, how much they adored him…even if, throughout most of his residency, I also felt that way myself.