german movie about a child piano prodigy

He never spoke at the end, though emotion sometimes surfaced. Levit delivered short talks, usually focussed on the music at hand. “Hard rock fan from Düsseldorf is thrilled,” one commenter said. Some viewers made musicological points-“New harmonic structures become transparent,” one person wrote when Levit tackled Brahms’s arrangement of the Bach Chaconne in D Minor-while others discussed the pianist’s facial hair, T-shirts, and footwear. Most comments were in German, but there were salutations from Nairobi, Tokyo, and Montevideo. In the following weeks, as Levit kept Webcasting each night, a convivial online community formed around him on Twitter and its Periscope app-a self-described “ Igor Familie.” Periscope includes a chat-room sidebar, with hearts floating up the screen like bubbles. It was no surprise that Levit’s inaugural live stream attracted attention, though I was taken aback when the number of viewers climbed into the tens of thousands. He has appeared on mainstream German TV shows participated in political panel discussions and attended the annual gathering of the Green Party, playing Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” the anthem of the European Union. In German-speaking countries, Levit is a familiar face not only to classical-music fans but also to a broader population that shares his leftist, internationalist world view. Other pianists of Levit’s generation may have achieved wider mass-market fame-Lang Lang and Yuja Wang come first to mind-but none have comparable stature as a cultural or even a political figure. It was an imposing structure aglow with feeling.

Let’s bring the house concert into the twenty-first century.” He then tore into Beethoven’s “Waldstein” Sonata, in a fashion typical of him-precipitate, purposeful, intricately nuanced. He gave a brief introduction, in German and English: “It’s a sad time, it’s a weird time, but acting is better than doing nothing. m., Levit pressed the Record button on his smartphone and trotted in front of his newly acquired home-Webcasting equipment, dressed casually in a black-and-gray pullover shirt and black pants. His instrument is a 1923 Steinway B that once belonged to the great Swiss pianist Edwin Fischer. He lives in a spacious, airy, sparely decorated apartment in the Mitte neighborhood of Berlin, with plate-glass windows overlooking a park. The setting was familiar, because I had met with him there the previous summer. I ran to the last electronics store that was still open, and got some stuff for twenty-four euros.” I was sending messages to friends: ‘Do you know how streaming works?’ And this tweet was already out there. I went on Twitter and said, ‘O.K., I’m going to play for you guys tonight at my place.’ After having tweeted that, I realized, Hang on-I’ve never streamed anything, I know shit about streaming, I don’t even know if Twitter allows thirty minutes of streaming, I have no camera stand. Levit went on, “When I got home, I did what I usually do, which is to throw a thought into the public arena without thinking about any consequences. Sometimes he seems more mature than his years, poised and oracular at others, he comes across as an antic, restless member of his digital-native generation. He was wearing a T-shirt that read “Love Music Hate Racism.” He speaks rapidly and incisively, his English nearly as good as his German.

He is a trim young man with sharp features, a high Mahlerian hairline, and a thin growth of beard. “On the twelfth, I was shopping in a grocery store, and I had this thought: What if I live-streamed a gig?” He peered into his phone with a grin. “That next day, the eleventh, was kind of a shock day,” Levit told me recently, in a video call from his apartment, in Berlin. He was also preparing to tackle an arcane colossus of the piano literature-the seventy-minute Piano Concerto by the early-twentieth-century composer-virtuoso Ferruccio Busoni, a hero of his. He had recently issued a boxed-set recording of Beethoven’s thirty-two piano sonatas, and was playing Beethoven cycles in several European cities. At the time, Levit had a full schedule before him. The next day, Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, delivered a dire warning about the scope of the looming coronavirus pandemic, and performance spaces began closing across the country. It was his thirty-third birthday and, it turned out, his last public concert for many weeks. On March 10th, the German pianist Igor Levit played Beethoven’s Third and Fifth Piano Concertos at the Elbphilharmonie, the hulking concert complex in Hamburg.

German movie about a child piano prodigy