Surfacing quietly as a digital download in December, this cri de coeur grew out of an ‘inner necessity’. ‘I spent’, Levit says, ‘the first four or five weeks after the attack [on Israel] on 7 October in a mixture of speechlessness and total paralysis. At some point, it became clear that I had no other tools than to react as an artist. I have the piano. I have my music. So the idea came to me to record these works and to donate my proceeds to two wonderful organisations that work in my home town in Berlin to help people who experience anti-Semitism and to help young people avoid falling into the clutches of anti-Semitism. It is my artistic reaction, as a person, as a musician, as a Jew.’ That ‘certain melancholy’ he finds in Mendelssohn’s and Alkan’s miniatures – Mendelssohn the baptised German Christian of Jewish bloodline, Alkan the younger French Ashkenazi Jewish contemporary of Chopin and Berlioz – has, he maintains, given him solace in recent months.

Levit brings rare nobility and intensity to 14 of Mendelssohn’s Songs without Words, his individualised selection spanning a period from 1829 to 1844. Apart from the virtuosic con fuoco A minor ‘Volkslied’, Op 53 No 5, much of the music is on the lyric arietta spectrum, beautifully articulated and speakingly communicative. The major-key numbers are warm-toned. The three minore ‘Venetian Gondola Songs’ from Opp 19, 30 and 62 muse and linger. Piercingly timed, the E minor ‘Funeral March’, Op 62 No 3, is magnificent, steering a resonantly grand near-Mahlerian course homaging fallen heroes. Alkan’s haunting, troubled Song of the Mad Woman by the Seashore, not from one of his post-Mendelssohn Recueil de chants but rather the Op 31 Préludes published in Paris in 1847, is the psychodrama of the album – at 5'41" a biblically archaic narrative tellingly slower than Ronald Smith (EMI/APR), Laurent Martin (Marco Polo) or Mark Viner (Piano Classics), high notes and low textures charged with torment and loss. Levit sculpts a demented, desolate cameo. Predictably fine production and engineering.

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