Igor Levit, Wigmore Hall

It takes a brave soul to record Beethoven’s dizzyingly complex late sonatas as your first release, but pianist Igor Levit did just that. The Russian-German virtuoso, a favourite at Wigmore Hall, has drawn the sort of accolades that would make anyone blush. Ivan Hewitt at The Telegraph put him “in a class of his own”, while in the words of the LA Times’ Mark Swed “He is the future.”
For the Wigmore Hall 2015/16 season, he will play a series of concerts entitled Perspectives. The first, this November, takes in three remarkably diverse pieces. First, there is Georg Muffat’s Passacaglia in G Minor (1690), a baroque keyboard showpiece that melds French and German influences. It will be followed by Shostakovich’s Piano Sonata No. 2 (1943), a romantically-inspired soundscape that has been unfairly unshadowed by his great war symphonies.
The main attraction, however, is undoubtably Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations (1819-23). Generally considered, along with Bach’s Goldberg Variations, the height of their form, these thirty-three miniatures demonstrate an unparalleled variety; the penultimate fugue’s key change is one of the most powerful ever written. Such a ceaseless experimentor as Arnold Schoenberg (Pierrot Lunaire) called them “the most adventurous work by Beethoven.” Under Levit’s hands, this looks to be an unmissable performance. Book now – only a handful of tickets remain.