Igor Levit
Piano
Levit is the recipient of the 2018 Gilmore Artist Award, Gramophone Classical Music Awards’ Artist of the Year 2020 and [Musical America]’s Recording Artist of the Year 2020. The [New York Times] described the German-Russian, who is internationally acclaimed for his energetic interpretations, as one of the “most important artists of his generation”. Levit was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany for his commitment to fighting anti-Semitism, and for his home concerts during the Corona lockdown.
Igor Levit began playing the piano at the age of three, gave his first solo concert at four and performed as a soloist with the orchestra of his Russian home town, the Philharmonic Orchestra of Nizhny Novgorod, at six. The exceptional pianist, who already won four prizes at the International Arthur Rubinstein Competition in Tel Aviv in 2005, completed his piano studies in Hanover in 2009 – with the highest mark in the history of the institute. Since then, Levit has made guest appearances with the world’s leading orchestras, such as the Berliner Philharmoniker, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Leipzig Gewandhausorchester, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra from Amsterdam, the Vienna Philharmonic and others. He has presented cycles of all Beethoven piano sonatas at the Salzburg Festival, the Lucerne Festival, Musikfest Berlin, Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie and the Wigmore Hall in London. Recitals have also taken him to Carnegie Hall in New York, the Concertgebouw Amsterdam and the Vienna Musikverein. Levit is artistic director of the Kammermusikakademie and the Heidelberger Frühling’s Standpunkte Festival. In 2019, he was appointed professor of piano at the Hanover University of Music, Drama and Media.
