The Alte Oper stands at the beginning of an impressive concert tour that will take Igor Levit through a whole series of cities over the next few weeks, from Hanover and Berlin via Nuremberg and Cologne to Freiburg, Munich and Heidelberg, each time with a different program.
The pianist's performance in Frankfurt also does not live up to expectations, at least not in the first part.
The death of Clara Schumann, who had had close ties to the Main metropolis for decades, prompted Brahms to compose a total of eleven organ chorale preludes, which he played at the funeral.
Ferruccio Busoni transcribed six of them for piano, thoughtful miniatures shaped by their own expectation of death, in the midst of the “Es ist ein Ros aussprungen” (It is a rose that has arisen) that is gently played around with reproaches.
The Magical Tristan Chord
Again song variations, this time about the folk song "Shenandoah".
The American jazz pianist Fred Hersch wrote them at the request of his friend Levit, a wealth of imaginative, contrasting short forms that followed one another without a break.
A new aspect: Levit's unobtrusively virtuoso technique of turning the page.
The almost magical suggestive power of the Tristan chord for the prelude to "Tristan und Isolde" also comes into effect in Zoltán Kocsis' piano reduction, especially in the dynamically sharpened contrasts.
The common final note of the prelude with the beginning of Liszt's incomparable Sonata in B minor made the different works a unity, further proof of the pianist's power of suggestion: rarely has one experienced such breathless silence in the Riesensaal.
Levit never gets into the danger of virtuoso demonstration acts, rather he unfolds the Faust material of the work to the last pianissimo.
What to bring after that?
After much hesitation, Levit decided on the Adagio cantabile from Beethoven's Sonata pathétique, the forgiving, relaxing conclusion to an unusual evening.