Brahms | Schumann | Beethoven

When Igor Levit performed Beethoven’s Sinfonia eroica in Franz Liszt’s version for piano at the 2024 Piano Fest, you could not help but wonder whether this pianist had twelve fingers instead of the normal ten. The hyper-virtuoso Liszt transcribed Beethoven’s symphonies with his own limitless possibilities in mind - his son-inlaw Hans von Bülow once called him the “Claviator maximus.” But Levit has no need to shy away from Liszt and so, to open the 2025 Piano Fest, will continue this daring journey by playing the Seventh Symphony, the “apotheosis of the dance,” whose finale seems to spin out of control into a sheer frenzy. Just like Liszt, Johannes Brahms was also able to conjure from the piano keys “an orchestra of lamenting and jubilant voices,” as his mentor Robert Schumann put it when Brahms played for him in the fall of 1853 - a very apt description, indeed, of the four Ballades, Op. 10, composed not long after. Schumann himself is represented on Levit’s program by the great C major Fantasy, Op. 17: a musical declaration of love to his bride Clara Wieck and the “most passionate thing I ever made,” as Schumann affirmed.

Program
17.30
Introduction to the Concert
with Susanne Stähr (KKL Luzern, Auditorium, in German)
18.30
Johannes Brahms (1833–1897)
Ballades, Op. 10
Robert Schumann (1810–1856)
Fantasy in C major, Op. 17
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827)
Symphony No. 7 in A major, Op. 92, arranged for piano by Franz Liszt S 464, no. 7

Intermission at c. 19.30