At first sight it seems odd to package Igor Levit’s glossy performances of the two Brahms piano concertos, with Christian Thielemann and the Vienna Philharmonic, with his exceptional disc of the four sets of late piano pieces. For while the concertos belong to separate phases of Brahms’s career – the D minor First was finished in 1858 and the Second, in B flat, 23 years later – the solo pieces belong to another musical world altogether. Dating from 1892 and 1893, those collections of intermezzi, capriccios and rhapsodies contain some of his most beautiful and introspective music. They are unlike anything else in the 19th-century piano repertoire.
Levit’s utterly compelling accounts of the late sets are the more impressive element in this collection. He does not put a foot wrong in any of them; each piece is perfectly shaped, its subtly varied emotional charge instantly identified. It’s hard to think of many better recordings of these 20 gems, and certainly not of all four opus numbers together.
