I’ve had a piano sounding in my head for the last five months, not an ideal sound but an actual one, the one played by Christian Zacharias at Carnegie Hall, on December 13th. I spoke with him the day before, a few minutes after he selected the instrument for his performance, and, clearly, he chose brilliantly. The very first notes of the sonata, by C. P. E. Bach, that opened the program sounded brightly, like chimes; where most concert-hall pianos resound darkly and woodily, Zacharias’s tone was lightly and brightly percussive, emphasizing the gestural element of pressing keys to make music, and the sound he achieved was integral to his realization of the music on the program—and of his remarkable philosophical ideas regarding the music.

With C. P. E. Bach, Zacharias was aptly impulsive and spontaneous, giving the impression of a composer urged on by sudden and fantastic emotion. With Beethoven’s third-to-last sonata, Op. 109, he was profoundly contemplative, as if constructing a mighty intellectual architecture in the darkest turmoil of the soul. As for Brahms’s last piano works, the four pieces of Op. 119, Zacharias revealed the contrapuntal intricacy of the freely rhapsodic emotion, bringing out so many buried notes that at times he seemed to be playing with three hands. And he utterly transfigured the concluding piece, Schubert’s Sonata in D Major, D. 850. Where other performers hear a compact weave of clatter and lyricism, Zacharias opened it out into a vast confessional peroration, a kind of musical expatiation through the forest-like wilds of Schubert’s own imagination—a very definition of subjectivity in music, a self-portrait in motion. The surprising calm under the first movement’s roiling phrases and the astonishing stillness of the third movement’s trio section suggest an intimate empathy with Schubert’s art that must have been, for Zacharias, as much of a self-exploration as a performance.

At home, I listen to lots of recordings of piano music; yet for months after this recital, it was hard for me to do so; the very essence of piano belonged, in my mind, to this concert, and the spell wasn’t ready to be broken. But circumstances intruded, and on Friday night, I went to an intimate concert hall, at Faust Harrison Pianos, to hear Beth Levin (whom I had met virtually on Twitter) perform Beethoven’s last three sonatas, Opp. 109, 110, and 111. Her performance, too, was revelatory—and what it revealed had as much to do with performance as such as it does with music, piano, and Beethoven.

About forty people filled a space that could easily hold fifty. There, Levin played an 1887 Steinway that thunders in the bass and tinkles in the treble; the sound of the keys being struck is an inevitable part of the music she made. From the very beginning of Op. 109, which started very quietly, slowly, ruminatively, and was filled in by diabolically dark and threatening notes in the left hand, it was apparent that the evening’s music would be filled with a rare fury. Ultimately, she brought the full terror factor to the music, realizing a vision of Beethoven as a dynamo of fantasy that ranged from celestial to violent—a wild man shattering with both fists the Biedermeier china and the sociable decorum. From pages of the scores that Beethoven filled with aggressively slashing clusters of notes, Levin played with a swirling, thunderous frenzy. When she rose at the end of each sonata, it seemed indecent to look at her—it was as if she had just gone through a holy ordeal that we profane spectators shouldn’t dare contemplate with bare eyes. The concert was emotionally and physically exhausting—doubtless so for Levin, but so also for the happy few in the audience.

Her performance reminded me of the only time I saw boxing live—a Golden Gloves event, held in a ring mounted near the southeastern corner of Central Park. The young boxers wore headgear—and yet this sport, which I had savored for decades on television, absolutely terrified me in person. The difference between a concert in an intimate space (and I sat about a dozen feet from Levin’s piano) and one in Carnegie Hall (and I had great seats for Zacharias’s concert—fifteenth row or so, in the orchestra) is like the difference between theatre and a movie. The kind of violence that makes for a fascinating and alluring spectacle in a movie would be an almost unbearable source of fear in the theatre, and the kind of performance that Zacharias achieved seems—paradoxically—similar to a movie. Zacharias is a master of the magnification of the infinitesimal gesture; he achieves a realization similar to the kind of closeup that actors offer on a big screen. (In fact, he told me that he prefers to perform in large concert spaces, such as Carnegie Hall, rather than in intimate ones, such as living rooms or drawing rooms: “At home, I just don’t have the space, it gets a bit loud, or dry… I love the halls and the feeling of space.”)

Zacharias is a pianist who is, so to speak, ready for his closeup, the key to which is the revelation of the face as an idea, of the gesture and the look as a universal. He’s a performer who is suited for the world stage—which is to say, for the equivalent of the international cinema. It’s an artistry of living history on the wing, one that depends on a sort of musical charisma, an instinctive kind of judgment that is akin to the experience of power at large, decision-making in any arena. It’s no surprise that, when he described to me the rarity of the performer who succeeds in making a career as a touring concert pianist, he used a political analogy, saying that there is,

one in a generation; it’s even more difficult than being President of the United states, because there are three or four in a generation.

What Levin achieved, by contrast, was an act of pure theatre—a set of musical gestures that were in perfect accord with the human scale of the room. They didn’t magnify the music or shift the spatial perspective; they conveyed Beethoven’s sonatas as human experience, conveyed the sense of being in the vicariously conjured presence of Beethoven himself, a man living with thoughts that—filtered through the projected spectrum of the grand concert—seemed abstracted. But conjured by the pianist near at hand, they seemed like the very incarnation of a monstre sacré. Whether the experience could be reproduced in a recording, or whether a recording would convey a comparable force, I don’t know (though I’d treasure the opportunity to find out). And, as in theatre, the difference between the divinely inspired and the factitiously rhetorical could be crossed in an instant. Levin didn’t cross it; but the very fact that she faced the risk rendered the concert all the more admirable.

by Richard Brody