One evening not long before the midterms, Igor Levit—a Russian-born pianist whose performances can be as intimate as a conversation and as forceful as his opinions—walked slowly onstage at Zankel Hall, deep below Seventh Avenue, and looked frankly into the audience. Levit, who lives in Berlin, likes to tell risqué jokes and is, as he puts it, “outspoken.” He has a prolific Twitter feed, where posts about German elections and U.S. politics jostle with virtuosic keyboard videos and silly memes; he once denounced Donald Trump from the stage as “a bigot, an opportunist, an angry and dangerous man.”
At Zankel, Levit’s program was drawn from his new album, “Life,” a rumination on the death of a friend. A U.S. flag hung motionless on stage right as Levit sat at the gleaming Steinway, raised one arm, and began a chaconne by Bach, in an arrangement by Brahms for left hand only. Music of impassioned wisdom fell within a handspan, and, as Levit played, his right hand sometimes rose to his chest, or formed a fist and softly punched the piano stool. After a quarter of an hour, the piece came to a close. A train rumbled past somewhere nearby. Levit wiped his eyes.
The next day, Levit, wearing a forest-green overcoat and owlish black glasses, arrived at the Juilliard School for a piano lesson. That morning, he had tweeted a video of himself playing a sidewalk piano, with a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes (caption: “Spontaneous gig for the people of the country I love so much. #WeThePeople”). Nobody had noticed him, but at Juilliard he was spotted at once. A fleshy man with a pink face and unruly blond hair approached Levit to compliment him on a recent performance. After thanking the man politely, Levit laughed. “He looked just like Boris Johnson!” Levit said. “It really freaked me out!”
Levit had come uptown to visit Matti Raekallio, a Finnish expert on piano fingering and his longtime teacher. When Levit was a teen-ager, in Hanover—his family moved there after Germany invited ex-Soviet Jews to immigrate—he studied with Raekallio, who left for Juilliard in 2007, when Levit was twenty. “I see him every time I come to New York,” Levit said. “It was tough when he moved.” Levit plays all over the world and has won some of the biggest prizes in the business, but, like other superstars, he still needs a good coach. He visits Raekallio about six times a year.
Upstairs, in Raekallio’s classroom, on the fifth floor, Levit settled himself in a corner under a Japanese ink-wash painting and hunched over his phone. A dozen Juilliard undergraduates were there, too, and three had been asked to prepare and play a sonata for the class. Levit finished speed-reading an article on Der Spiegel and leaned over to confide the news that the Indonesian government was looking for a new capital because Jakarta was sinking into the ocean. “Welcome to climate change,” he whispered. Then Raekallio, an avuncular man in suspenders and a black shirt monogrammed with silver thread, squeezed past the two grand pianos that occupied the room’s center and sat down where he could see the keyboards. “Let’s begin,” he said.
A student played two movements of a rollicking Haydn sonata—“Very fine,” Raekallio commented—and then it was the turn of Yun-Chih Hsu, a senior from Taiwan with her hair in a bob, who had brought some Beethoven. Hsu played confidently, and Levit often looked up, cocking his head and beating time while the other students texted, or zoned out, or corrected essays. After returning to her seat, Hsu waited for the next piece to begin, then picked up her rose-gold iPhone and took a sly shot of Levit.
After an hour, class was dismissed, and Levit was left alone with Raekallio. Levit wanted his teacher’s opinion on his performance the night before. “I was thinking of this Miles Davis quote, ‘It takes a long time to sound like yourself,’ ” Levit said. “The concert began, and I was thinking of this and of that. And then at some point I was literally thinking of absolutely nothing.”
Raekallio nodded. “That’s a great sign.”
“I was empty, in a beautiful way,” Levit continued. “It felt like a step forward, yesterday. But today it’s gone. Thank God it’s gone—I can’t be in that zone. But it was very, very special.”
Next, it was time for the lesson. Levit had also brought Beethoven, his Sonata No. 7. “I haven't really played this in a year. I’m bringing it back slowly,” he said, and began to play, presto, at great speed. Up close, the sound was astonishing but unpolished, and Levit made the little grunts of somebody working very hard. His fingers, brawny and unusually flexible, raced up and down the keyboard.
“Play from the main note,” Raekallio said, when Levit stopped. “YA-ba-da-ba-da-ba, YA-ba-da-ba-da-ba. That’s motivic.”
“You know what some people play here, right?” Levit said.
“I know,” Raekallio replied.”Pya-da-ba-da-BA-da, pya-da-ba-da-BA-da.”
Levit sniggered. “It's kind of silly.”
“I think it's idiotic,” Raekallio said.
After a happy hour of piano nerdery, Levit and Raekallio made plans to meet on New Year’s Eve. Before leaving, Levit played a few bars of what sounded like a slightly pompous waltz. Raekallio asked, “What do you think of as the basic concept of this movement?”
Levit thought about it for a second. “A chubby, middle-good opera singer, trying to do well,” he said, “And getting lost all the time.”
“Exactly,” Raekallio said, sitting down at the second piano and demonstrating a comically lumpy trill. Levit had a go: suddenly, it sounded like a mezzo-soprano. “Right, right,” Raekallio said, chuckling.
It was time to go. The next day, Levit was flying to Germany, for a concert in Munich; a week later, he’d be in California, then Vancouver. And soon he would be back in the recording studio. For now, though, he was heading back to his hotel, on the Lower East Side, near Yonah Schimmel’s knishery. “It’s wonderful, just wonderful!” he said. “The last time I was there, the owner insisted I have soup. I told him, ‘I don’t want soup.’ ” (He got the soup.) In the elevator, Levit told a final joke, in his best Yiddish accent. Then he embraced his teacher and walked out into the night.
Sourse: newyorker.com
