The Liberation of Music Igor Levit in Conversation with Michael Kube
Several centuries of music history separate Muffat and Kerll from Busoni and Rzewski. How would you describe the idea behind this program? I like to conceive programs by starting with the last major piece and then working backward, as it were. In this case, I had a strong wish to close with Busoni. As a figure, as a composer, a theorist and pianist, he has without a doubt been one of the most influential musical personalities in my life. His Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music is a kind of Bible for me, and I consider the Fantasia contrappuntistica one of the greatest piano works of all time. In this piece, Busoni not only takes inspiration from Bach’s unfinished The Art of Fugue, but transforms it for the 20th century, so to speak. More than anything, it’s a kind of release. Busoni essentially unchains Bach’s material—although it’s certainly debatable whether this works or not. At its core, it’s a deeply utopian piece of music, aimed at transcendency. I find it simply breathtaking. This idea of freedom in free music is also, I believe, very important to Frederic Rzewski. In this context, I very much wanted to perform Rzewski’s Dreams II, a piece he dedicated to me. It was commissioned for the Heidelberger Frühling Festival, where I played the world premiere in 2015—one of the most important concerts of my life so far. How so? The evening of the premiere also marked my first public performance of Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations. As a composer and as a human being who was and remains very close to my life, Frederic Rzewski has contributed greatly to my own freedom. His fearlessness is something I have absorbed intensely in recent years. That’s
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