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.
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For all their technical mastery though, not all the performances are quite as musically convincing. There’s something rather dogged about the Chromatic Fantasia, though the fugue that follows is beautifully unfolded, while the Liszt veers between lethargy and spontaneity, with a studied slow movement but thrillingly articulated final fugue. Berg’s sonata is preceded by a tiny Brahmsian Klavierstück (more B minor!) that he composed while studying with Schoenberg in 1907-08; it’s one of four encore pieces that Levit includes, all of them just as meticulously played as the major works they frame.
• This article was amended on 5 October 2023. An earlier version had the plural version rather than the singular version of Klavierstück.
