Igor Levit

This will be quite an experience: Igor Levit’s cycle of the complete Beethoven piano sonatas in the Elbphilharmonie Grand Hall! If you listen to the 32-year-old pianist play Beethoven, you feel as if he is taking you by the hand and leading you, resolute but friendly, on reconnaissance expeditions through a heavily built-up area. Beethoven sounds as direct, spontaneous and physical as life itself, but at the same time as existential and awkward as the things that determine human happiness. Levit achieves the magical balance between the details and the obviousness of the whole that really makes Beethoven such a unique classical composer.