One of my private theories of performance is that as dog owners look like their dogs, so pianists look like their approach to playing. And a case in point is the Russo-German pianist Igor Levit, whose cycle of the complete Beethoven sonatas is the hot ticket of the current Wigmore Hall season.
Levit is young, smart, sharp, and wears impressively well-tailored lounge suits on the platform: clean-cut, modern, sleek. And an assessment of his Beethoven sonatas would read similarly. They’re immaculately well-presented: fresh and clean, as though disburdened of irrelevance and undue weight. His technique is so elegant it almost makes you want to laugh with pleasure – not least, when he steers the final measures of a movement into the most perfect of soft landings, like a pilot in complete command of the descent on to the runway. Nothing flusters him. His judgment is acute, his understanding of what’s foreground as opposed to background always “sorted”. And his dazzling facility is neither dazzling nor facile in a bad sense. It’s a brilliance that reveals rather than hides, and truly opens up the inner life of the sonatas.
