Igor Levit: Tristan
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Label: Sony
Cat No: 19439943482
Format: CD
Number of Discs: 2
Release Date: 9th September 2022
Contents
Works
TristanEtudes d'execution transcendante (12), S139
» no.11 in D flat major 'Harmonies du soir'
Liebestraume (3), S541 » no.3 Nocturne in A flat major
Symphony no.10 in F sharp major (Adagio) (arr. Ronald Stevenson)Tristan und Isolde
» Prelude (trans. Kocsis)
Artists
Igor Levit (piano)Gewandhausorchester Leipzig
Conductor
Franz Welser-MostWorks
TristanEtudes d'execution transcendante (12), S139
» no.11 in D flat major 'Harmonies du soir'
Liebestraume (3), S541 » no.3 Nocturne in A flat major
Symphony no.10 in F sharp major (Adagio) (arr. Ronald Stevenson)Tristan und Isolde
» Prelude (trans. Kocsis)
Artists
Igor Levit (piano)Gewandhausorchester Leipzig
Conductor
Franz Welser-MostAbout
Sony Classical is happy to announce the release of Igor Levit’s new album “Tristan”. Known for his unique recording projects, the pianist “like no other” (The New Yorker) explores the great questions of life and existence, illuminating both famous and extremely rare repertoire. The album is now available as a double CD.
The pianist has sculpted a singularly original programme from both familiar and virtually unknown pieces. In this album, he explores nocturnal themes of love and death, fear, ecstasy, loneliness and redemption in the music of Richard Wagner, Franz Liszt, Gustav Mahler and Hans Werner Henze.
The five works, including Liszt’s Liebestraum no.3 and Harmonies du soir, as well as transcriptions of Wagner’s Prelude to Tristan und Isolde and Mahler’s Adagio from Symphony no.10, span a period of 135 years (1837 to 1973) and represent very different genres. Only one of these works was originally conceived for piano solo, but Igor Levit’s exploration of borderline experiences in our lives – death in Life (2018), spirituality in Encounter (2020) and now, with Tristan, the link between love, death and our need for redemption – inevitably means that it is not just masterpieces for the piano that are central to his concern but, above all, compositions in which certain thematic associations find their most personal expression.
Henze’s work Tristan, which is the album’s central work, represents Levit’s first solo-album recording with orchestra. He recorded it with the internationally renowned Gewandhausorchester Leipzig under conductor Franz Welser-Möst. The work is inspired by Wagner’s great opera Tristan and Isolde, from which the legendary Prelude appears here in the popular transcription by pianist Zoltán Kocsis.
Igor Levit is one of THE most relevant and in-demand pianists out there today. Known for his cool and unique recording projects, often monumental in scope, but always accessible thanks to Igor’s brilliant and persuasive communication. His recordings often win top industry awards (Grammy nomination, Opus Klassik Bestseller, Gramophone Artist of the Year, Musical America Recording Artist of the year etc.), they make countless critics’ “best of the year” lists and regularly land on Germany’s top 20 album charts. He champions rare and sometimes politically motivated repertoire both in the recording studio and on stage.
The pianist has sculpted a singularly original programme from both familiar and virtually unknown pieces. In this album, he explores nocturnal themes of love and death, fear, ecstasy, loneliness and redemption in the music of Richard Wagner, Franz Liszt, Gustav Mahler and Hans Werner Henze.
The five works, including Liszt’s Liebestraum no.3 and Harmonies du soir, as well as transcriptions of Wagner’s Prelude to Tristan und Isolde and Mahler’s Adagio from Symphony no.10, span a period of 135 years (1837 to 1973) and represent very different genres. Only one of these works was originally conceived for piano solo, but Igor Levit’s exploration of borderline experiences in our lives – death in Life (2018), spirituality in Encounter (2020) and now, with Tristan, the link between love, death and our need for redemption – inevitably means that it is not just masterpieces for the piano that are central to his concern but, above all, compositions in which certain thematic associations find their most personal expression.
Henze’s work Tristan, which is the album’s central work, represents Levit’s first solo-album recording with orchestra. He recorded it with the internationally renowned Gewandhausorchester Leipzig under conductor Franz Welser-Möst. The work is inspired by Wagner’s great opera Tristan and Isolde, from which the legendary Prelude appears here in the popular transcription by pianist Zoltán Kocsis.
Igor Levit is one of THE most relevant and in-demand pianists out there today. Known for his cool and unique recording projects, often monumental in scope, but always accessible thanks to Igor’s brilliant and persuasive communication. His recordings often win top industry awards (Grammy nomination, Opus Klassik Bestseller, Gramophone Artist of the Year, Musical America Recording Artist of the year etc.), they make countless critics’ “best of the year” lists and regularly land on Germany’s top 20 album charts. He champions rare and sometimes politically motivated repertoire both in the recording studio and on stage.
Sound/Video
Paused
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1Liszt: Liebestraum no. 3 in A flat major, S541/3
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2Henze: Tristan: I Prologue
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3Henze: Tristan: II Lament
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4Henze: Tristan: III Preludes and Variations
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5Henze: Tristan: IV Tristan’s Folly
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6Henze: Tristan: V Adagio – Burla I – Burla II – Ricercare I – Burla III – Ricercare II
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7Henze: Tristan: VI Epilogue
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8Tristan und Isolde: Prelude (arr. Zoltán Kocsis)
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9Mahler: Symphony No.10: Adagio (arr. Ronald Stevenson)
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10Liszt: Transcendental Études, S139: no.11 Harmonies du soir
Europadisc Review
Over the past few years, German pianist Igor Levit has made something of a speciality of releasing two-disc sets of outstanding and sometimes rare piano music on weighty themes. 2018 saw the release of ‘Life’, with works by Bach, Busoni, Bill Evans, Liszt, Frederic Rzewski and Schumann, pondering Death as well as Life, and including Liszt's transcription of Isolde's Liebestod from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. Two years ago, he released 'Encounter', an album of works by Brahms, Feldman and Reger, as well Busoni's transcriptions of chorale preludes by Bach and Brahms – all featured in his home broadcasts during lockdown, at a time when the value of human encounters had rarely been felt more strongly. In 2021, his combination of Shostakovich's 24 Preludes and Fugues, op.87, with Ronald Stevenson's monumental Passacaglia on DSCH was another great critical success.
Some of these strands are evident in his latest double-album. Entitled simply ‘Tristan’, its cover features Levit himself standing with feet firmly planted, gazing determinedly at the camera, against a dramatic, brooding cloudscape, with the grand piano, its lid fully open and ready for action, to his left. There’s something of Wagner’s titular hero to his slightly worn, haggard look, but also a suggestion (thanks to the moody backdrop) of Caspar David Friedrich’s ‘Wanderer above the Sea of Fog’ as if seen from the front.
The recital’s notional centrepiece is the late Zoltán Kocsis’s transcription of the Prelude to Act 1 of Tristan und Isolde, in a hugely impressive performance where every note, line and chord feels perfectly judged with regard to weight and colour. Although the piano lacks the sustaining power of strings and wind that makes the opening of this Prelude so iconic, Levit’s care over dynamics ensures that the opening crescendo phrase loses none of its absorbing power. Similarly, his range of attack and tonal shading substitutes admirably for the loss of orchestral variety and nuance. And he builds the tension and pacing magnificently to a thunderous climax, before dying away to a perfect suggestion of cello and bass pizzicato.
This bleak ending leads into another work deeply concerned with Life, Death and Love: the opening Adagio of Mahler’s unfinished Tenth Symphony, in Ronald Stevenson’s powerful, virtuosic piano transcription. Like Tristan, it begins with a single line, and at times it’s hard to believe that more than half a century separates these two extraordinary works, the first a harbinger of musical modernism, the second a decisive moment in the development of Viennese modernism as it emerged from the ashes of late Romanticism. Once again, the sheer range of touch, weight and colour is quite remarkable, sometimes emitting an organ-like subterranean growl, at others (even more than in the Tristan Prelude) highlighting strands and dissonances not usually evident in orchestral performance. Levit proves excellent at bringing out the expressive differences between the main idea and the lighter, more sardonic second theme and its related sections.
As with the Tristan Prelude, but even more devastatingly, the Adagio builds to an overwhelming climax, with Stevenson deploying tremolo surprisingly effectively at the two famous nine-note chords that form the movement’s apex. The way in which the music then steadily relaxes in tension, and the beatific, ethereal final chords, are things of wonder in this hugely assured performance.
Preceding the Tristan Prelude is a related work of a very different kind: Hans Werner Henze’s Tristan (1972-73) for piano, electronic tape and large orchestra. It started life as just the opening Prologue (originally, Prelude), but soon grew into a vast six-movement work that not only attempted to exorcise Henze’s own problematic relationship with Wagner’s antisemitism and the wartime associations of his music, but also responded to such contemporary events as the deaths of Salvador Allende and W.H. Auden, and the whole question of subjectivity in late Romantic music. Henze quotes Chopin’s Funeral March and (most prominently) the opening of Brahms’s First Symphony, only for them to be fractured and absorbed in a manner similar to Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia of five years earlier.
Long stretches for solo piano, others purely for orchestra, and others for combined forces as well as a disembodied child’s voice reading (in English) from the medieval Tristan poem, make Henze’s Tristan part-solo instrumental, part-concerto, part-symphony. Apart from the passages of direct quotation, the musical language is uncompromisingly modernist, and the dynamic and expressive range huge. In this performance Levit, along with Leipzig’s Gewandhausorchester under the baton of Franz Welser-Möst, shows enormous commitment and technical brilliance. Although Henze’s music here involves a pointed critique of Wagnerian late Romanticism, the sense of expressive involvement is no less powerful, and you may well find yourself returning (as we did) to this piece as much as to the Wagner and Mahler transcriptions for repeated listening.
Bookending the entire programme are two pieces by Liszt from the early 1850s that, both in terms of expressive content and harmonic style, laid foundations for Wagner's own mature style: the A flat major Liebestraum, S541 no.3, and ‘Harmonies du soir’, the eleventh of the Transcendental Etudes, S139. Both receive performances of real depth and emotional maturity, the Liebestraum welcoming the listener into the album with warm animation, ‘Harmonies du soir’ providing a thrillingly full-blooded apotheosis which (like Mahler’s Adagio) dies away to a most exquisite close.
Anyone who has been following Levit’s extraordinary career will want to hear this album, but all those with an interest in high- and late-Romantic piano music as well as the development of post-Romantic modernism ought to investigate it. Performances of this calibre in this repertoire are rare, and we loved every immersive minute.
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