The piano, with its five-hundred-year history from the organ pioneers of the Renaissance to Bach and the virtuosos of the nineteenth century to the present day, still exerts an unbroken fascination. There is no other explanation for the fact that two new piano festivals have now been launched in Lucerne in quick succession, both with success: "Le Piano Symphonique" in February, supported by the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra and with an illustrious group of guest soloists, and now the "Piano Festival", a seasonal offshoot of the Lucerne Festival. It is curated by Igor Levit, who has a loyal following here as a regular guest of the summer festival. His four-day pianist meeting brought a colorful mixture of the known and the unknown, played solo or in a duo with performers from his circle of friends and students. Consistently recognizable was his endeavor to open up the supposedly elitist concert ritual to everyday life. Or "to break out", as a popular slogan of the sixties avant-garde goes.
Four decades ago, Friedrich Gulda also demonstrated in the "Munich Piano Summer" how this break-up works. When the fun-loving Viennese with his hippie cap and thick watch on his wrist sat down at the grand piano, played Mozart enchantingly and then improvised for an hour together with Chick Corea and Nicolas Economou, the barriers between musician and listener were torn down in no time. Gulda's uncomplicated, heart-opening address to the audience played a decisive role in this.
Igor Levit's body language works
Levit, the communicator and influencer steeled by social media, on the other hand, seems surprisingly rather inhibited in verbal communication. On the other hand, he knows how to use body language in a more targeted manner. And it works. The audience lies at his feet and reacts to every demonstrative hand movement, such as when he adjusts the piano chair, with enthusiastic murmurs. The worship of the soloist as a magician and genius is transformed into an exuberant sympathy for an artist who, with performative understatement, provides a new, lighter tone in the concert hall.
But Levit is not a dogmatist and also had the Russian pianist Anna Vinnitskaya perform in a traditional recital. It began with the rarely heard piano version of the organ piece "Prélude, fugue et variation" op. 18 by César Franck and then shone in Alexander Scriabin's Fifth Sonata and in "La Valse" by Maurice Ravel with a grandiosely developed pianistic style – a highlight in this piano festival.
Despite a wink of not wanting to be elitist, Levit did not make it easy for the audience. In his solo recital, he seemed to want to demonstratively shake off the image of the cool fast and straight forward player, which he had reaffirmed the day before in a duo with Alexei Volodin with Mozart's Sonata in D major, K. 448. He began in a deeply thoughtful way with the "Four Serious Songs" by Brahms, arranged for piano by Max Reger, and then continued the tone in the piano version of the first movement from Gustav Mahler's unfinished Tenth Symphony. The very long Adagio, which already radiates inner turmoil, sadness and bright despair in the orchestral version, is even more disturbing in the nakedness of the piano writing. The fact that Levit has taken on this hard-to-digest piece is a credit to him.