The New Yorker - USA (2020-05-18)

50 THENEWYORKER,M AY18, 2020

know a level of suffering that these full-
of-themselves, elegant mid-sixties art-
ists have absolutely no fucking idea
about. Give me a break! Anyway, that’s
where I started, with late Beethoven.
Matti really helped give me that atti-
tude. He would say, ‘Just go do it. Just
be a pianist. I will help you not to be
an idiot.’ ”
When that début recording arrived
in the mail, I rolled my eyes, but skep-
ticism soon gave way to wonder. The
opening gestures of Opus 111, in C Minor,
were almost frightening in their inten-
sity; the inward-searching lyricism of
the second movement suggested a sage
elder who could remember the world
before the wars. When Levit traversed
the entire cycle for Sony, in sessions ex-
tending from 2017 to 2019, he consid-
ered rerecording the late sonatas, but de-
cided that his earlier attempts held up.
A sleight of hand happens as you make
your way through the set: Beethoven
gets older while Levit gets younger.
In 2014, Levit made his North Amer-
ican début with an all-Beethoven pro-
gram at the Park Avenue Armory.
Surpassing even the assurance of his
recordings, he proved to be no fluke of
the studio. At the same time, I thought
that his playing tended toward extremes.
Between the heaven-storming up-
tempo passages and the cosmic can-
tilenas, I yearned for a little more wit
and whimsy. The good news of the Sony
set is that it has these qualities in pro-
fusion, especially in the less celebrated
corners of the canon. In the Andante
of Opus 14, No. 2—a sequence of sub-
tly playful variations on a somewhat
drab theme—Levit teases out under-
stated comedy in unexpected variations
of dynamics, with a perfectly executed
fortissimo punch line. In the first move-
ment of Opus 78, he finds an easy-flow-
ing, Schubertian songfulness in the main
theme, which then gives way to mer-
curial shifts in mood.
Having established himself as an au-
thoritative Beethovenian, Levit looked
both backward and forward. In 2014, he
released a recording of the Bach Parti-
tas; the following year, he issued a three-
disk set of three gigantic variation se-
quences: Bach’s Goldbergs, Beethoven’s
Diabellis, and Rzewski’s “People United.”
That effort led to a collaboration with
the performance artist Marina Abra-

mović, whom Levit met through the

impresario Alex Poots, who was in

charge of the Park Avenue Armory at

the time. Levit found himself playing

the Goldbergs while drifting across the

vast Armory space on a rotating plat-

form. He enjoyed the carnivalesque at-

mosphere that Abramović brought in

her wake. Although he is generally

indifferent to celebrity names of the

American type—when I mentioned

David Geffen Hall, he asked, “There is

a Mr. Geffen?”—he was dazzled when

Abramović showed up backstage with

OURD AYS

1

In Chuck’s dream, a strange woman

is smoking in our kitchen.

She’s doing her best, she says,

exhaling into the oven.

Then three military men

burst in without knocking.

They say they’ve come

to establish order,

but their uniforms are strange.

Chuck suspects they’re really salesmen.

Their leader stands too close

as he begins his pitch—

close enough to spread a virus.

2

I take a photo of a house

painted half blue, half pink.

Why am I drawn

to things that make no sense?

Or is their sense excessive?

You need to decontextualize

an object

in order to see it,

I once said.

Last sloth

in a pocket of rain forest;

exquisite scent

of hyacinth

wafted

on the wingless breeze.

—Rae Armantrout