Encounter (2020)

performed by Igor Levit (piano)
composed by Ferruccio Busoni, Johannes Brahms, Max Reger, Morton Feldman

Following on his Life album, pianist Igor Levit enters similarly cosmic conceptual territory with Encounter, an album that, one may learn from the graphics, "stages encounters between people and time, heaven and earth." The essay that follows does not add any degree of specificity to this, and one does not come any closer to knowing why, say, Bach-Busoni and Brahms-Busoni would stage an encounter between people and time, heaven and earth, while plain old Bach and Brahms would not. Indeed, apart from the grand finale, Morton ... Read More

Following on his Life album, pianist Igor Levit enters similarly cosmic conceptual territory with Encounter, an album that, one may learn from the graphics, "stages encounters between people and time, heaven and earth." The essay that follows does not add any degree of specificity to this, and one does not come any closer to knowing why, say, Bach-Busoni and Brahms-Busoni would stage an encounter between people and time, heaven and earth, while plain old Bach and Brahms would not. Indeed, apart from the grand finale, Morton Feldman's Palais de Mari, nothing here was originally for the piano, and it is unclear how this layer of mediation is meant to affect the listener's "encounter." Set all this aside, however, and Levit is his usual brilliant self. The program follows a big trajectory from dense to, in the Feldman, near-absolute sparsity, and Levit is masterful in realizing both. In the Busoni transcriptions of Bach's Ten Chorale Preludes for organ, Levit has an uncanny way of differentiating the... Read Less