Igor Levit has made a speciality of tackling some of the most monumental of 20th-century piano works, and at the heart of his fascination with these pieces has been the Fantasia contrappuntistica, Ferruccio Busoni’s massive homage to Bach’s Art of Fugue, which began as a completion of the unfinished final fugue of that work, but soon took on a life of its own. Levit included the hugely challenging score in a Wigmore Hall recital in 2016, but recording it now, he says in the sleeve notes to these discs: “Represents the final destination of the journey that I have been undertaking in terms of my repertory in recent years.”
He makes the Fantasia the climax of a sequence of single-movement works in which musical freedom and formal rigour are finely balanced, beginning with Bach’s Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue, and continuing with Liszt’s single-movement B minor Sonata and Berg’s Sonata Op 1, also in B minor and just one movement. It’s a characteristically thoughtful piece of programming, magnificently crowned by the Busoni, its huge, discursive structure projected as a thrillingly communicative and wonderfully coloured piece of musical architecture.
