United States Beethoven, Rzewski: Igor Levit (piano). Stern Auditorium, Carnegie Hall, New York, 22.1.2026. (ES-S)
Beethoven – 33 Variations on a Waltz by Diabelli, Op.120
Frederic Rzewski – The People United Will Never Be Defeated!
Igor Levit’s recital at Carnegie Hall brought together two of the most formidable variation cycles in the piano repertoire: Beethoven’s 33 Variations on a Waltz by Diabelli and Rzewski’s The People United Will Never Be Defeated!. Heard back-to-back, the pairing framed variation not as a display of virtuosity, but as a mode of critique and resistance – whether directed against musical convention or political oppression – and, ultimately, as a vehicle for transformation.
Levit approached the Diabelli Variations with an emphasis on articulation and contrast over lyrical continuity. The opening theme was taken briskly, its bluntness underlined rather than softened, setting the tone for a traversal that did not shy from exaggeration and irony. Fast variations were driven close to the edge, occasionally at the expense of fully projecting secondary voices, while slower ones unfolded with greater deliberation.
Sudden textural changes, such as the ungainly bass intrusions in the third variation or the abrupt skeletal writing that interrupts the scherzo of Variation 15, were allowed to sound deliberately abrasive. The sequence of C minor variations late in the cycle – Adagio ma non troppo, Andante, sempre cantabile and Largo, molto espressivo – emerged as a focal point, shaped with inward concentration and a finely judged sense of tonal gravity. In these passages, where momentum gives way to suspension, Levit’s control of soft dynamics and precision of touch, with every sound carefully caressed, proved especially persuasive. Immediately after, the fugue of Variation 32 was propelled forward with dry insistence, its obsessive subject articulated more as a mechanism than a proclamation, while the concluding minuet registered not as reconciliation but as a knowingly archaic mask, worn with faint irony.
After the intermission, Levit turned to Frederic Rzewski’s The People United Will Never Be Defeated!, a work with which he has a long-standing and personal association. As with the Diabelli theme, the initial statement of the Chilean protest song was projected firmly but without grandiosity. ¡El pueblo unido jamás será vencido! preserved its vocal profile and collective character. From there, the thirty-six variations accumulated with inexorable force. Their stylistic range – from percussive violence to jazz-inflected looseness and dense contrapuntal writing – was unified by an unyielding rhythmic spine. March patterns and reiterated pulses anchored even the most volatile episodes, preventing stylistic contrast from tipping into fragmentation.
Levit met the work’s formidable technical demands with authority. Extreme registral leaps, layered textures and extended endurance never obscured the piece’s large-scale trajectory. Drum-like left-hand writing was kept deliberately dry, reinforcing the music’s sense of collective movement without turning it into expressive display. The score’s percussive gestures, including keyboard-lid strikes, functioned as rhythmic punctuation, not theatrical effect. Levit also observed the score’s instruction to whistle fragments of the theme, introducing an exposed human voice that momentarily cut across the piano’s exclusive presence within the concert hall. Set against keyboard-lid strikes and forceful physical attacks, the whistling sounded fragile and provisional, recalling the song’s street-level origins and reinforcing Rzewski’s refusal to turn the collective struggle he was evoking into an aesthetic object to be admired.
When the optional cadenza arrived near the end, Levit treated it as a moment of reckoning, in line with Rzewski’s view of the passage as an ethical response instead of a locus for ornamental freedom. The composer places the cadenza after the written cycle has run its course, not to invite transcendence or virtuosic display, but to require the performer to confront the musical and historical material already accumulated. Levit answered that challenge by compressing fragments of earlier rhythms and gestures into a charged space of memory, subjecting them to interruption and pressure, before allowing the theme’s final return to assert itself with renewed force.
What ultimately clarified the evening’s significance was the way these two works pointed beyond themselves. Igor Levit has long argued that Rzewski’s The People United Will Never Be Defeated! belongs alongside J.S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations and Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations as one of the great monuments of the variation tradition. That claim emerged naturally from this performance. Beethoven dismantles his quasi-banal theme through parody, irony and excess; Rzewski engages his through accumulation, quotation and persistence. Measured implicitly against Bach’s foundational model, both works treat variation not as mere embellishment or as a means of displaying a composer’s imaginative powers, but as a way of thinking capable of absorbing history, conflict and contradiction without relinquishing formal rigor.
Edward Sava-Segal