Yoav Levanon's ; A Monument for Beethoven' celebrates those composers who contributed to the commission and erecting of the Beethoven memorial in Bonn on the 75th anniversay of his death. This unifying element is complemented by an audacious programme that ranges through the great keyboard Romantics; Liszt, Chopin and Schumann, together with Mendelssohn. I should add that the sleeve includes a picture of the Beethoven memorial and, perhaps less wisely, the pianist as Liszt, complete with shoulder length hair and with quill pen at the ready.. Levanon's own note with its reference to 'the diabolic and tempestuous reaches of the heart' and, in contrast, 'the profundity of spiritual existence' is all of a piece with performances of, overall, a dazzling ardour and facility.
As an example of early talent(Levanon was 17 at the time of this recording) these performances intermittently show a poetry and freedom backed by technique of a trail-blazing quality. And while it would be easy to talk of immaturity, I feel it necessary to recall some wise words by Daniel Barenboim regarding his early recordings of the complete Mozart Concertos and Beethoven Sonatas. Asked whether he considered it wise to record such entrenched masterpieces so early in his career he replied that his performances possessed their own youthful validity. Later, aged thirty and forty, his approach would be different, not necessarily better but different. As his friend and colleague Vladimir Ashkenazy put it, performance is part of a changing growth and spiritual perception.
Here, my qualifications centre on Levanon's Liszt Sonata, a Romantic landmark in the history or music once considered as incomprehensible as it was unplayable, but now in the repertoires of virtually every pianist. From Levanon I came to feel that youthful brio while dazzling at one level is not enough for music of such stature. Too often there is a free and easy way with note values and an elasticity bordering on incoherence. There is too little sense of focus, and never more so that in the slow descending scales at the close of the Quasi Adagio, that nodal and expressive centre of the Sonata. Again, in the coda, alive as one writer put it with 'ghostly sighs and glassy threats,' Levanon's freedom is excessive and unstable. Cruelly, recordings by pianists of the stature of Horowitz, Rubinstein, Richter, Gilels, Argerich and Zimerman rise in one's consciousness, performances for all their infinite variety the reverse of immature.
Again freedom(that push-pull rubato) becomes counter-productive in Chopin's opus 45 Prelude, that cloudy prophecy of late Brahms. But then you turn to Levanon in Mendelssohn's Variations serieuses and reservations vanish. Whether in the virtuosic variations 10, 11, 12 and 15, or in the oasis of beauty and calm of variations 13-14 this is a performance to rank with those of an established fame and celebrity. Even more remarkably, Levanon achieves what is his truest triumph in the Schumann Fantasie where he shows a born feel for the composer's ardour and wildly fluctuating moods. The treacherous leaps at the close of the second movement(that 'locus classicus of the wrong note') hold no terrors for him, and his way with the finale, once so aptly described as like so much 'shifting sunset vapour' is alive with poetry and rapture.
Finally, as an encore, there is Liszt's 'La Campanella, from Levanon a marvel of changing pace, colour and nuance within his scintillating pyrotechnical display.
Bryce Morrison