The alchemist's chambers of musical studio recordings are usually closed to the listener; he only hears the results. But it is clear that this quiet work in a small team not only allows for on-site corrections, but - especially with soloists - also enables a different inner balance with breathing pauses and deliberations than a live performance that does not know such mechanical and mental compensation possibilities. This can be particularly relevant for a work lasting two and a half hours, forty-eight times changing mental temperatures and fingerings, such as Dmitri Shostakovich's Preludes and Fugues, Op. 87.

Igor Levit's recent CD recording of this conditionally exhausting, rarely tackled cycle (Sony) for his concert tour, which took him to the Berlin Philharmonic on Thursday, initially only provides outlines, for example of the physical wear and tear of such a large symphonic thick, although but only a bundle of notes intended for two hands. One noticed this fatigue during the performance, not least because the artist, who had made the first parts sound as an alternately illuminated but organism flowing organism, in which not only the key-related preludes and fugues, but also the successive pairs, were almost without paragraphs had connected to each other, later had to set breathtaking reflections.

But didn't such moments of struggling to find oneself in front of this mountain of music correspond exactly with its role in the life of the composer himself? For him, the cycle from the winter of 1950/51, which grew out of Shostakovich's Bach experience in Leipzig, was an escape and refuge in one: the self-insurance of his own artistic, in Stalin's later years no longer directly endangered physically, but still with stick and carrot Existence under the quasi timeless, invulnerable protective umbrella of Bach - a utopia undermined by fears, doubts and cynical-self-injurious sarcasms.

And where Tatjana Nikolajewa, his inspiring pianist for the premiere, emphasized the hopeful features longing for stabilizing harmony, where Keith Jarrett, for example, later drew in a supporting framework - including emotional ones - through transparent architecture, it is now up to Levit, the repressed traumas, the crisis-ridden ones and to bring out the hysterical features of the music at times. This has consequences because it often drives the inner unity of the parts apart like fragile ice floes and does not look for tones of relaxation and deep breathing, even where they might find space. They are most likely to win in the early, widely stretched joints in E and B minor, even if here under the twilight, the November sky is cloudy and cloudy. But even the F sharp minor fugue twitches in Levit,Skinny and dry, as he hits the headline, a kind of claustrophobic hopelessness, he lets the following E major pair end in an evil cracking fortissimo, after which the motor driven nature of the following C sharp minor prelude offers no resolution either.

And so on, minutes after minutes. For a long time, poetic and lyrical things only have fragmentary and quasi-quoted space and only come back as a real relaxation area when the B minor couple is allowed to speak cautiously of dreams and hopes again much later - darkly shaded, but not depressive tones that then gradually make room win and only here, after almost two hours, suggest the idea that for Shostakovich there might have been something like an ideal and, in sum, even cautiously optimistic or at least self-pacified overall concept. Levit is following this path with reservations, with an as if, which, however, could have been in the spirit of the Creator: not exactly theatrical in the presentation and playing of the hymns, chorals and folk songs,but so ostentatious, sometimes grimacing, that the mistrust is part of it.

It has its most shocking moments when, beneath the security of classical tradition, naked despair breaks out: in the convulsive, flapping G sharp minor fugue and the almost atonal, raging D flat major fugue that seems to jump out of one's own skin. In contrast to some of the over-enforced and then also unclear in their polyphonic vocal lead, especially in some fast major parts (including even the light sky blue floating in A major fugue, but all too quickly grounded), Igor Levit's stupendous technical mastery with Shostakovich's piercing self-search goes here a seamless A synthesis that can never be taken for granted and - for the performer himself as well as for his listeners - always remains unfathomable and endangered: an expedition into the oppressively unsecured as the whole evening.