If ever there was a box of delights, this is it. Mischa Levitzki (1898-1941) was Ukrainian-born but a naturalised American, who during his tragically brief life enchanted audiences with his engaging, charismatic personality and scintillating technique. APR’s invaluable two-disc set is a remake of an earlier, long unavailable issue, the audio either re-transferred or significantly cleaned up. Even in the hysterical, pell-mell virtuosity of, say, Chopin’s Third Ballade, these performances are never less than personal and mesmeric. Levitzki was hardly backwards in coming forwards, and APR’s lavish presentation shows him clutching a koala during an Australian tour and fashionably dressed in a baggy-trousered, double-breasted suit. Predictably, his repertoire centres on the Romantics and in one flamboyant example after another he grabs you by the ears.

His headlong flight through Chopin’s First Prelude includes an unmarked repeat, while he is genial and beguiling in the G flat major Waltz. True, there is much snatching at phrases in the Third Scherzo, and he has little time for the way Chopin ends the penultimate Prelude of his Op 28, floating in a harmonic limbo. But he is suitably rumbustious in Beethoven’s Écossaises and captures all of Schumann’s madcap wildness in his G minor Sonata. He is Florestan personified, yet also sensitive to the Andantino’s Eusebian dreamworld. There is thunder and lightning aplenty in Liszt’s First Concerto, and if there is an occasional smudge or rushing of fences, you have to remember that these recordings were made before the advent of cut-and-paste editing. Levitzki’s bravura can be as unstoppable as a force of nature. He storms his way through Un sospiro with a happy indifference to its title (it was originally a ‘caprice poétique’ as well as an étude), though there is some capitulation to Romantic glamour at the close. His La campanella includes a brilliantly protracted steam-whistle trill at the climax and in three Hungarian Rhapsodies (Nos 6, 12 and 13) his aplomb is all-embracing. Hardly a pianist for the darker side of the repertoire (it is difficult to imagine him in Liszt’s Nuages gris or the later Rhapsodies), his playing is a fantasy of glitter and imaginative resource. After Rachmaninov’s G minor Prelude, in which he skims through the central section, seemingly immune to its charms, he ends with his own Valse amour, where he is truly ‘amour’.

Mischa Levitzki

‘The Complete HMV Recordings’

Mischa Levitzki pf

APR APR6043 (2 CDs)

This review originally appeared in the Summer 2024 issue of International Piano. Never miss an issue – subscribe today