Life – Igor Levit

   in Piano International (Jan, 2019)
Igor Levit’s latest 2-CD album is a sufficiently epic achievement to make even his finest rivals sound small-minded by comparison. The underlying theme of Life is the journey from the earthly to the seraphic, ‘music whose bleak grandeur and melancholy beauty’ is lovingly chosen by Levit as solace after the death of a close friend.

Busoni’s Fantasia after JS Bach gives us one composer through the prism of another, an elegy in memory of Busoni’s father. Indeed, Busoni is the presiding presence in this extraordinary album, and never more so than in his outsize setting of Liszt’s organ Fantasia and Fugue on the Chorale ‘Ad nos, ad salutarem undam’, …