Igor Levit plays Beethoven: The elves at the ear is plucked

Warm, soft, but carrying, singing, and beautiful, like an invitation you can't refuse, sounds the first chord of Beethoven's f sharp major Sonata op.78 under Igor Levits hands. Here is someone who knows how much it matters at the piano on the resonances of the plays: The depth of Fis in the Bass, the Cis in the upper parts of luminaires; it is based and will not wear, to covers. From the very first note, everything is sonically balanced. Again and again one is for Levits cycle of all 32 Beethoven sonatas, he plays in Salzburg's house for Mozart, and soon in Lucerne and at the music festival in Berlin to repeat, this silk-Matt, shimmering, intense buzzing piano can admire. The Pianist used the left Pedal to steam not less than the rights of the reverb. Him is a sound of intimacy, such as Beethoven so often requires explicitly.

Jan Brachmann

editor in the features section.

For several months, Levits Beethoven cycle is also available on nine CDs on Sony Classical. He is not the only Pianist who has worked in the anniversary year with the piano sonatas. Fazil Say (Warner) and Konstantin Lifschitz (Alpha Classics/Outhere) did it also. About Say you don't need discussing. His piano playing meets professional Standards rarely. He plays both the sound as well as the form of disposition indiscriminately and uncontrollably. In the "Appassionata" op. 57 in the final Presto, as in the case of a shooting in front of one and a half decades, the exhausted, bordering on the Embarrassing. From old mistakes, he has learned nothing.

Lifschitz, however, has a compelling intensity. He makes a Listen to not go. An intangible light sound in the late sonatas, his piano. Lifschitz is not attenuates, revealed mysterious reflections between the upper voice and the Bass in the ecstatic quivering of the conclusion of variations of the E major Sonata, op. 109, has a sense of Pathos that does not ask for self-control, for the polder areas of the breath and the imagination, where the music is generous on the banks of the enter can.