The People United Will Never Be Defeated
Every day, a brief tweet with a time and a URL: it’s usually for 7:00 pm Berlin time, 1:00 pm in eastern North America. At almost precisely 7:00 pm, we click, and a 9:16 aspect ratio window opens. The view, about ten degrees left from perpendicular, shows the keyboard and the left half of a grand piano, a painting and a couple of lamps hanging in view. Igor Levit, dressed casually, wearing socks or slippers, walks onscreen and sits on his piano stool. He talks for about five to ten minutes, first in German, then in English. Then he plays: Beethoven, Liszt, Shostakovich, Billy Joel. Twitter/Periscope’s muffled, distorted sound and low-definition image offers anywhere from 15 to 150 minutes of the most intensely charged piano playing I’ve ever heard. The set ends, Levit clutches his head, pounds his thigh, then walks towards the camera and shuts off the phone. This pattern repeats for an extraordinary 52 days (with very rare breaks), from March 12 to May 4.
One usually looks to art galleries and film festivals for a sense of what’s on the avant-garde edge of sound-and-image art. For these pandemic-laden months, with galleries and cinemas shuttered, something extraordinary is happening in the most tradition-bound art, Western classical music—or Western art music, as I prefer to call it. It’s not just Levit, though he stands at the head of an astonishingly vital set of online streaming sessions. Events like Bang on a Can Marathon, Music Never Sleeps, and performers as disparate as the Berlin Philharmonic, veteran pianist Angela Hewitt, and young pianist Tiffany Poon are inventing pathways
