Here I am again – three Recordings of the Month in a mere six months – though it’s not because my ears have gone soft during Covid. And it is, after all, Igor Levit who’s at the keyboard. So what makes this special? To start with, he never goes into a studio without a clear vision in mind, and this album of Shostakovich and Stevenson is no exception. He makes us appreciate afresh the lineage and innovation of Shostakovich’s 24 Preludes and Fugues, Op 87; and what a brilliant notion to couple them with Ronald Stevenson’s homage to the Russian, his formidable Passacaglia on DSCH. And, like all the greatest artists, when Levit is playing you have the sense that there is no other way to perform this music.

The Stevenson is a work that deserves to get out more but its combination of length (at some 80 minutes it is the longest single-movement solo piano work in the repertoire), extreme virtuosity and fugue-laden intellectual demands means that it requires a very particular pianistic skill set to bring it off. Ronald Stevenson was himself a considerable pianist, as his two recordings of the work attest, though the earlier one, originally made in Cape Town in 1964 and now on APR, is the more formidably accomplished.

Levit is unquestionably the finest artist of current times to have added it to his repertoire and I heard him give a thrillingly visceral, epic reading at Wigmore Hall a couple of years back. This studio account is every bit as compelling, making you realise afresh what a masterpiece this is. The many moments where Stevenson seems to transcend the possibilities of the keyboard, becoming positively symphonic in his writing, leave him unfazed and each section follows with complete inevitability, yet there’s plenty of contrast, too, for instance in the sequence of dances that form the Suite in the Pars prima, while the ‘Pibroch (Lament for the Children)’ has a desolation to it that is as heartfelt as the composer’s own.

Moving on to the Pars altera, the ‘Fanfare – Forebodings’ section is terrifying, while the ‘Glimpse of a War Vision’ has a surreal beauty (Stevenson was a conscientious objector and spent a year in Wormwood Scrubs after refusing to sign up for National Service); from the depths then grow ‘Variations on “Peace, Bread and the Land” (1917)’, in which Levit reveals a Messiaen-like colour palette. This is one of those jaw-dropping moments where most pianists (James Willshire and Murray McLachlan among them) show some strain, but not Levit – the ‘Central Episode: Études’ is dispatched with a hyper-virtuosity but also a rare grandeur. The DSCH motif is ever present, of course, but never becomes overbearing or merely repetitive. To the Triple Fugue, which is overly softly contoured in Willshire’s reading and too coolly efficient in McLachlan’s hands, Levit brings a plasticity and an inexorability ameliorated by a humanity that is very potent.

Pars tertia takes us back to Bach and the ‘Subject II: BACH’ is alluringly coloured, while the following ‘Subject III: Dies irae’ seems to be hewn from solid rock, Levit alive to its terrifying vision. The final section, based on a French ouverture-type dotted rhythm around the DSCH motif, is again given due weight and as we reach the Passacaglia’s final moments there is a fitting sense of having experienced an epic journey with the most imaginative of guides.

The Bachian element in Stevenson’s homage to Shostakovich is also at the root of the Russian’s great cycle of Preludes and Fugues, premiered by Tatiana Nikolayeva in 1952. And, much as I admire her reading of this set, Levit is more than a match for her. Space precludes a detailed analysis but let me offer a few observations. His sense of characterisation in each piece (often determined by key) is unerring: there’s a freshness to the opening C major Prelude, while to the Fugue he brings a quiet absorption, the textures always perfectly balanced. But he’s equally alive to Shostakovich in more acerbic mood, whether in the nervous march of the Eighth Prelude in F sharp minor (where Nikolayeva is also persuasive) and its anxiety-laden Fugue, rendered monumental in Levit’s spacious reading, or the sardonic D flat major Prelude (No 15) and its Fugue, a tour de force of complexity; Donohoe doesn’t manage the same impact, even though he’s not exactly sluggish, tempo-wise. Shostakovich the symphonist is there too, in the B minor Prelude of No 6, its dotted rhythms conveying a sense of immutable strength and leading without resolution into a growly, obsessive fugue. Here he treads a middle ground between Nikolayeva, whom I find a touch too deliberate, and Donohoe, who makes less of its power. To the Bach-inspired numbers Levit brings a characterful immediacy, whether in the bustling E major two-voice Fugue of No 9, for instance, or the Prelude of No 10, which quotes directly from the ‘48’. And the 14th Prelude in E flat minor has never sounded quite as starkly anguished as it does here, with a folk-like melody against a tremolo backdrop.

Levit is compelling, too, in the concluding numbers of each half: the Passacaglia of No 12 emerges from the rumbling depths, while he patently enjoys the jazzy Fugue, with its 5/4 time signature. Levit outdoes Nikolayeva in grandeur in the final Prelude in D minor, the bruising closing harmonies potent indeed. The Fugue combines a Bachian inevitability with a sense of the epic that is Shostakovich’s own and Levit isn’t afraid to let rip, but always with that cushioned sound that has become a trademark.