Classical home listening - lockdown discs from Igor Levit, Daumants Liepiņš and Bayreuth

The Guardian 0

Levit’s double album of Bach, Brahms and Reger captures the lockdown mood. Plus, Wagner at Wahnfried, a rising-star pianist’s debut, and where Derek Jarman meets Henryk Górecki

• Every recording from Igor Levit, the Russian-born, Berlin-based pianist, is an event (in fact this “event’ was launched in September but thanks to Covid delays only reached me late November). He’s as skilled at dreaming up album ideas, always driven by musical purpose, as he is at tackling the major works of the repertoire, recently the complete Beethoven sonatas. Levit’s latest release, recorded in lockdown in May 2020, is Encounter (Sony), a double album of Chorale Preludes by Bach and Brahms in the versions by Busoni, together with shorter works by Brahms (arr. Reger) and Reger (arr. Julian Becker) – you get the idea – and a work by one composer pure and simple: Palais de Mari by Morton Feldman.