Igor Levit | Adelaide Festival 2021 review
Levit is a screen natural and has regularly streamed his house concerts worldwide during the pandemic.
Adelaide Festival
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Igor Levit
Classical Music / Germany
FESTIVAL
Her Majesty’s Theatre and Sir Robert Helpmann Theatre
March 7
Beethoven’s 33 Variations in C on a Waltz by Diabelli was the perfect choice for this live stream from Germany.
It’s the composer at his most outrageous with manic outbursts beside heavenly outpourings, complex polyphony rubbing shoulders with the simplest constructions and, above all, humour appearing with exalted rhetoric when least expected.
This was big hair Beethoven on the big screen. And the larger-than-life images plus cinema sound enabled a totally different experience from the traditional acoustic concert platform.
Levit was a good choice for the task. He’s a screen natural and has regularly streamed his house concerts worldwide during the pandemic.
Every facial expression – and there were many – was caught in detail and the symphonic sounds generated through Her Maj’s banks of speakers lent oh so much weight to Beethoven’s utterances.
Indeed, that’s probably how Beethoven’s Variations sounded in his own head, as by the time of their composition he could hear them no other way. What he would not have imagined was the inevitable camera shots of dancing fingers on the keys, a balletic substratum that occasionally became a distraction.
In many ways Levit gave a thoroughly traditional reading of Beethoven’s gigantic canvas.
The famous Bachian Variation 31, replete with its haunting melismatic melodic figuration, was as tender as you could wish for, the following mighty Fugue was handled with superb control and the gentle final Minuet evaporated as readily as Levit’s image vanished from the screen, somewhat peremptorily before the ample applause could get to him.
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