POSTPONED: LvB250 – IGOR LEVIT ”THE LAST SONATAS”

This concert will take place 18 October

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Igor Levit is one of his generation’s most important pianists (he was born in 1987) and he regularly appears on all of the major concert stages worldwide. He has performed at Konserthuset Stockholm on several occasions, each time with Beethoven on the programme. When he returns for the major Beethoven anniversary, he will do so emphatically – in eight concerts, he will perform all 32 of Beethoven’s piano sonatas.

After the monumental Hammerklavier Sonata No. 29, Beethoven returns in Sonata No. 30 to a smaller format and brings out his melodic, poetic side. The concluding variation movement is rare with its enormous richness of expression, which draws out the heartfelt theme.

But Beethoven is never predictable, and the subsequent Sonata No. 31 is expressive, reflective, sometimes brutal, but also humorous and life-affirming: music that serves as an entire biography.

Like Pathétique, the mighty final sonata, Opus 111, begins with a heavy and majestic mood, before the passionate Allegro takes over, with its enormous development of power. It only has two movements, which surprised Schlesinger, who had commissioned it and who wondered if perhaps the score printer had forgotten a movement! Naturally, this was not the case. Instead, these are two movements with the greatest possible contrasting effects – a fierce and turbulent first movement and a sublime and monumental second movement, in which Beethoven was thought to not want to limit himself at all, as he explored brand new harmonic possibilities.