Recording of the Week, Igor Levit's Fantasia

An imaginatively-programmed new album from Igor Levit is becoming something of an autumn tradition, and after last year’s rather esoteric project dominated by Henze’s Tristan we’re back on slightly less challenging terrain today with a recital centring on the fantasia and featuring works by JS Bach, Liszt, Berg and Busoni.

Levit isn’t the first major pianist to construct an album around this genre of late: back in April, Alexander Melnikov presented a striking collection of fantasias (also including works by Bach and Busoni) on an assortment of historical instruments including a tangent piano and an Erard, and although Levit limits himself to a single piano the variety of touch and colour on display here comes close to rivalling that of his more promiscuous colleague.

Both pianists take Bach’s mighty Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue BWV903 as their jumping-off point, though Levit precedes it with a beguiling curtain-raiser in the form of Alexander Siloti’s transcription of the famous ‘Air on a G String’ from the Orchestral Suite No. 3, given with a simple eloquence and cantabile beauty that set the tone for his approach for the more complex works to come.

The Fantasia and Fugue itself receives a fleet-footed, quicksilver performance that’s notably less emphatic than Melnikov’s: rather than pausing for thought on the Fantasia’s unexpected harmonic twists-and-turns, Levit gives the impression of a formidable imagination in free-flow mode, though without short-changing the music’s ability to surprise.

The Fugue, by way of contrast, creeps almost hesitantly into life, rather as if the composer were carefully assembling his raw materials before getting down to business; with minimal use of pedal and rubato, Levit’s modern concert grand almost sounds like a second cousin to the clavichord which András Schiff used for his illuminating recording back in January, and the clarity of both passagework and counterpoint is exemplary throughout. You could take dictation from this playing, were you so minded.

Clear-eyed precision is also the watchword in the account of Liszt’s Piano Sonata which follows, particularly in the stormier sections of the outer movements: even the densest, most virtuosic music here sounds airborne and agile, so that when the gloves finally come off for the first time on the album (about six minutes into the last movement) the thrill is all the more potent. The tenderness and warmth which Levit brings to the slow movement should amply allay any suspicions that this is an album ruled by the head rather than the heart, and the transcription of Schubert’s Der Doppelgänger emerges so organically from the Sonata’s finale that it feels like a canonical postscript to the more substantial work.

The transition from Liszt to Berg might sound like a sharp one on paper, but one of the lovely things about this album is its impression of seamlessness: both the programming itself and Levit’s ever-thoughtful approach to the material points up all manner of connections between the four featured composers, and the tiny Klavierstück which Berg composed in his early twenties sounds for all the world like it could be a discarded Liszt sketch. The Piano Sonata too (also an early work) sounds lushly Romantic here, with Levit deploying rubato much more liberally than in the first half of the programme and suggesting just a whiff of the piano-bar – this is an eminently approachable reading, even if you’re generally allergic to the Second Viennese School.

The last major event on the programme is Busoni’s formidable Fantasia Contrappuntistica from 1910, which brings us back to Bach: Busoni conceived it as an homage of sorts to The Art of Fugue, with the third of the work’s mini-fugues incorporating the B-A-C-H motif. It’s a piece that has been in Levit’s fingers for years, and it shows: he has the full measure of Busoni’s zany architecture, and that clarity which was so evident in his Bach pays real dividends in music that can so easily seem congested in lesser hands.

And Levit’s sign-off is a gem: Busoni’s enchanting Nuit de Noël, published in Paris and sounding like Debussy in a slightly odd mood, evokes the starry sky and shepherds’ pipe-carols of Christmas night with unhackneyed beauty, and closes one of Levit’s finest achievements to date on a fittingly radiant note.