Igor Levit plays Beethoven, Bartók and Brahms

Featured Artist Igor Levit gleefully smashes through the bounds of the conventional piano recital, in an absorbing programme placing Beethoven, Brahms and Bartók in electrifying counterpoint.

Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge was once described as music that will always be modern. Levit is joined by Markus Becker in this work originally conceived for string quartet, and another that’s best known in a version for orchestra: Brahms’s Haydn Variations, which interrogates the past via the present.

And then there’s Bartók’s Sonata, which still packs a head-spinning punch. Two pianists, two percussionists, and a masterpiece whose inner fire is as fierce – and as life affirming – as ever.