Concert Review: Igor Levit, NYPO Play Brahms

Piano Concerto No. 1 receives lackluster reading at Carnegie Hall

May 6, 2022 — Carnegie Hall, NYC

This was my first post-Covid visit to Carnegie Hall, and Igor Levit's debut with the New York Philharmonic, so my hopes were high. They were not met. I feel like a real bastard panning a live performance in this day and age — our arts institutions need all the help they can get, and no in-person experience should be taken for granted — but honesty compels me to observe that this was as flat a Brahms First as I've ever heard.

The fault lay squarely with the Philharmonic's terminally uninteresting music director, Jaap van Zweden. This was my second time hearing him live, and he's made the same impression both times: a lean, bright sound; fairly quick speeds; and a sub-zero emotional temperature. There was nothing gauche or perverse about the reading, but nothing surprising or imaginative, either. Everything glided along in a smooth, predictable, boring way. This was the musical equivalent of a great oil painting reproduced on a postcard — a masterwork reduced to an over-familiar souvenir.

The orchestra/piano balance was also out of whack — the Philharmonic winds were often louder than Levit's Steinway D — so I found it hard to evaluate the soloist's work. In the past, Levit has struck me as a sensitive and (more intermittently) exciting musician. Here, undone by the conductor's lack of care for balancing and general emotional torpor, he made little impression. Most of his work sounded muffled and under-powered. He shaped solo passages with some care and delicacy, but no underlying passion. Only in the slow movement cadenza, which had the stillness of a late Beethoven adagio — and where, of course, the orchestra played no part — did I sense a deep connection with the music.

It used to be assumed that this concerto was Brahms's requiem for his friend and mentor Schumann, who had been institutionalized following a suicide attempt just before Brahms began work on the piece. As far as I know, no Brahms biographer has definitively verified this notion — but, in a great performance, the music's dark passion lends it credibility. On record, conductors as different as George Szell (taut, propulsive) and Eugen Jochum (expansive, oceanic) have made us feel that darkness. Van Zweden gave us background music.