Igor Levit has rapidly achieved cult status, as he certainly deserves. He has already reached the stage where he can programme enormous and pretty obscure works, such as Ronald Stevenson’s Passacaglia. Clearly, Levit’s taste runs to large-scale works, but his recently released disc, Life, shows his command of shorter pieces too.
His first concert in this run of three was Bach’s Goldberg Variations, a performance that commanded an instant hush and was greeted with almost unseemly cheering and stamping from the Wigmore audience. Levit began this masterpiece in a remarkably quiet way, almost casually, but with an amazing singing tone. Indeed, except for the punctuating rigorous canons, he cultivated cantabile throughout, his journey into the depths of this fathomless work being as different as possible from either of Glenn Gould’s recordings, long the gold standard for the Goldbergs. Performances of this work do tend towards the dogmatic, as I find with Andras Schiff, whom Levit admires.
For most of his performance Levit offered us the chance to respond as we liked, and it was only about halfway through that the intensity of his vision of the whole work gathered us for his transcendental treatment of its ultimate reaches.
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