It is a mark of Igor Levit’s standing that he can sell out the Wigmore Hall weeks in advance with an all-Brahms programme. In the event, some fractious pre-concert jostling for returns seemed almost justified: this was an outstanding evening’s pianism.
When Brahms embarked on a remarkable year of composition in 1892, he was 59 – not especially old – and yet an almost unrelieved melancholy pervades the four sets of late piano pieces, which suggests either an irreparably broken heart or an awareness of his own mortality. (And, in fact, he only had five years to live.) It makes a traversal of these often inward-looking works a special challenge.
