In many respects these last two recordings by Beth Levin – Hammerklavier Live and Phantasmata – may share an allusion to the famous Heiligenstadt Testament,  albeit they represent the work of five different composers. Of course,  the fabled Testament belongs to no one but Ludwig van Beethoven.  Fabled…? Picture Beethoven as a kind of forerunner of our  all-but-mythical Superman, one arm outstretched as he is about to pierce  the mystical skin of the music of the skies en route to the Divine. Now  picture all of the composers whose works Ms Levin has performed on  these two recordings – a proverbial posse of legendary composer-meteors  streaking heavenward en route to… the Divine

Indeed, Ms Levin has sojourned with them, practicing all her life as  if to superscribe her career path onto that Heiligenstadt Testament. It  is as if she were doing what Beethoven is believed to have exhorted  every artist to do: “Don’t only practice your art,” he said, “But force  your way into its secrets; art deserves that, for it and knowledge can  raise man to the Divine.” And here we have two versions of that  Testament representing Ms Levin’s quest to traverse the musical  continuum streaking her way – and seemingly uniting it – via disparate  parts of the world – through a space-time warp all her own. In doing so,  Ms Levin has joined several imaginary dots in the sonic constellation  of that heavenly continuum.

Ms Levin is the epitomé of a proverbial, questing artist rooted in  the future, often looking back, then forward zig-zagging across the  artistic firmament creating astronomical sonic connections that all come  together in the end, uniting us – indeed raising us together with  herself – to that Zion-like peak of her pianism… to the véritable apogee  at the very heart of her musicianship. The beauty of it all is that one  is unable to pronounce one better than the other. Rather they ought to  be seen a Promethean musical expedition [without the heroic falls to the  bas of the mountain of course] en route to its peak. And what  incredibly good fortune to be part of this musical journey.

The main event of the 2020 recording – a live performance beautifully  captured on record by Alan Wonneberger, at the Linehan Concert Hall,  University of Maryland during the 2019 edition of Festival Baltimore –  is, of course, Beethoven’s mighty Piano Sonata No 29 in B-flat major, Op. 106 ‘Hammerklavier’. On the way to the pinnacle of this recording Ms Levin joins some dots. From Beethoven’s great predecessor, Georg Frideric Handel.  Her choice of the repertoire to draw a gossamer-like line from Handel  to Beethoven is extremely interesting too, with a piece from a series  that recalls his mastery of the keyboard – something his later German  acolyte shared with him.

This is Third Suite for Piano in D minor [from 8 Suites de Pieces Clavicin HWV 428. Characteristically this glorious suite also casts Handel in the role of the magnificent successor to J.S. Bach – not only as a keyboardist but also as a composer of enormous wit and  invention. This is certainly true of the last movement of the suite –  its Air with 5 Variations. Of course, the build up to this  grand finale is magnificent to. Handel’s suites lend themselves to being  played on the piano as well as on the Baroque keyboard.

Certainly, Ms Levin plays the entire suite eloquently. And so, when  the playing is this good – as it is with the piano-caressing fingers of  Ms Levin – it’s hard to imagine anyone playing them better than her. She  brings a quality to this music which is both mellow and incisive. Above  all, her playing emphasizes the brilliance of the music rather than the  brilliance of her own playing. This too is portentous as Ms Levin  swerves through her space-time continuum towards Beethoven’s ‘Hammerklavier’ via a 21st century piece – Anders Eliasson’s  pianistically ingenious carousel. The detour is almost providential as  it augurs well for the main event. The big ECG-like consonances and  dissonances, its liquid glissandos and broad arpeggios take us to quite  another world – as if reflected in a shattered mirror, in a forest, like  a Mendelssohnian scherzo. All of which leads up to Ms Levin’s  Beethoven.

The pianist’s technically astonishing performance should take its  rightful place among the great performances of the epic sonata – with  Pollini’s performance of Beethoven’s Late Sonatas. But, more especially  to the point, Ms Levin’s ‘Hammerklavier’ is evocative of that most definitive performance by Solomon. And yet Ms Levin’s [performance is unsurpassable in its delicacy – especially in the brilliant Largo – Allegro risoluto movement.

Moreover, where the ‘Hammerklavier’ demands it she ensures  that it gets the full powerhouse treatment – both at the beginning and  at the end. This is surely how the composer must have imagined the music  – both in terms that recall his Heiligenstadt Testament as  well as in terms of the way the music is conceived – as being profound  and intense in that quintessentially grand Beethovenian manner.

She follows that seminal recording up with another brilliant one –  this time with concept both similar – yet vastly different – to the live  performance. This recording – like the title of the album itself – is  [also] purposeful wandering through ‘a garden of delights’ reminiscent  of a work by the great Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges.  Thus, and indeed appropriately, the album is entitled Phantasma. Here  we are beckoned by the pianist like that fabled mesmeric piper of  Hamelin – through the Pictures at an Exhibition by Modest Mussorgsky.

This time, the grand lead in – even before the seductive Promenade – is via an exposition of another big work by arguably the greatest pianist of his [and many-an-era then or now] Franz Liszt, whose monumental work, the Sonata in B minor it is that leads us from one great hall in the museum of the sky into another great hall housing the Pictures at an Exhibition with which Mussorgsky paid homage to his friend – the architect and painter Victor Hartmann who died in 1873.

We are gently ushered – at times de rigueur commandeered – by the  prodigiously-gifted pianist to Mussorgsky via the grand architecture of  Liszt’s Sonata in B minor. It too has a homage – this one to Robert Schumann and is cast, like Schumann’s Fantasie in C, in three movements that are played without a pause. And it’s most  appropriately played – as befits the vast work that it is – underlaid by  a series of themes and motifs that grow, fuse and eventually expire.  Three of the main motifs are stated in the opening bars: a softly  ominous descending phrase, a wildly animated one, and a low growl of  repeated notes.

Liszt weaves these together and drives these along a whirl of furious  semi-quavers, exploring a kaleidoscopic range of thematic  transformations. The first motif is escalated into a ‘big tune’ of  grandiose dimensions; another becomes a lyric melodic line of great  tenderness. The second movement ushers in a mood of subdued, even  spiritual solemnity. Finally, although there is no tangible evidence  indicating a representation of Goethe’s Faust, its difficult not to project a Faustian subtext, especially as Liszt does projects a demonic fury onto its last movement.

Many pianists treat the Sonata in B minor either as a  barnstorming melodrama or as a rather unwieldly successor to Beethoven’s  late sonatas. In Beth Levin’s hands the music’s visionary dimension  stands out, but it feels as if every phrase has been carefully thought  out in terms of weight and colour; the work’s undoubted histrionic  quality is tempered by moments of iridescent delicacy and calm.

Again, the high drama if the Liszt sonata is a perfect build-up to second ‘main’ event – Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition.  Ms Levin leads us through the great hall of paintings, leading us in  with the ubiquitous Promenade – the recurring theme representing “the  viewer’s” walking between the Romantic and often fantastical pictures.  There are ten pictures in all, each one a superbly atmospheric miniature  that utilises the piano’s expressive potential in a way that suggests  the influence of Liszt but reveals greater psychological insight.

A wide range of moods is depicted, from the sinister melancholy of –  and mimicking the kind of dramatic short-legged walking tempi – of the Gnomus, through the playfulness of Les Tuileries [appearing to presage Claude Debussy], to the grand triumphalism of The Great Gate of Kiev. Although this is an epic suite for the piano it is almost always recalled in its version orchestrated by Maurice Ravel in 1922, and – in more recent times – by the rock version which the keyboardist Keith Emerson of Emerson, Lake and Palmer played on his great bank of electronic synthesizers [including a giant Moog].

Beth Levin gives us perhaps the most authentically grand version, a  strong reading of the original piano suite, with bold and dramatic  playing that makes one think that the orchestration didn’t  really add  anything substantial to the work. In sheer colour and variety [cue Promenade],  in the depth of its characterisation and the exceptional range and  refinement of its pianism, Ms Levin imparts a power and dramatic stature  to the ambience of this suite which no amount of orchestral bigness can  – or has – achieved.

With buoyant, aristocratic grace and psychological ambiguity, Ms  Levin brings an almost insolent virtuosity and swagger to the piano  works on both recordings. This is the world of piano evoked as few  practitioners could even hope to try and emulate.

Deo Gratis…

Beth Levin: Hammerklavier Live 

Music – 1. Georg Friedrich Handel – Third Suite for Piano in D minor [from 8 Suites de Pieces Clavicin HWV 428, first collection, 1720] – i. Praelüdium. Presto, ii. Allegro, iii. Allemande, iv. Courante, v. Air with 5 Variations, vi. Presto. 2. Anders Eliasson – vii. Carosello [Designo No. 3 for piano, 2005]. Ludwig van Beethoven – Piano Sonata No 29 in B-flat major, Op. 106 ‘Hammerklavier’ viii. Allegro, ix. Scherzo. Assai vivace, x. Adagio sostenuto.  Appassionato e con molto sentimento, xi. Largo – Allegro risoluto [1817 –  1818].

Musician – Beth Levin: piano

Released: 2020
Label: Aldilá Records ARCD011
[aldilarecords.de]
Runtime: 1:12:21

Beth Levin: Phantasmata
Music – Franz Liszt: i. Sonata in B minor [1853]. Modest Mussorgsky – Bilder einer Ausstellung [1874] – ii. Promenade, iii. Bydlo, iv. Promenade, v. Il veccio castelo, vi.  Promenade, vii. Tuileries [Despute d’enfants apres jeux], viii. Bydlo  [Heavy ox-cart], ix. Promenade. x. Ballet of the Unhatched chicks in  their Eggs, xi. Samuel Goldenberg & Schmuyle, xii. Promenade, xiii.  Limoges. Le Marche, xvi. Catacombae [Sepulchurm Romanum], xv. Cum  Mortuis in lingua mortua, xvi. Baba Yaga. The Hut on Fowl’s Legs, xvii.  The Great Gate of Kiev.

Musician – Beth Levin: piano

Released: 2024
Label: Aldilá Records ARCD024
[aldilarecords.de]
Runtime: 1:12:08