It seems hard to avoid running into ground-breaking pianist Igor Levit these days. Not two weeks ago, he was making news in Berlin with his collaboration and anti-fascist protest performance with rapper Danger Dan. I woke up this morning with his emotionally-laden Bach transcriptions washing around in my head. And now I learn that he plans to turn up the volume a notch or two more with his own record label: No Silence.
This is the first release on the No Silence label, a single of Levit playing Erik Satie’s Gymnopédie No. 1 (stream on Apple Music in Atmos, for better audio). A second single was released a couple of days ago, and this tells you something about where the label is headed, which is to say, not just a vanity label for Levit: this one is Schubert’s Ständchen as transcribed by Liszt, the debut solo recording of pianist Lukas Sternath.
Sternath is Igor Levit’s student and a BBC New Generation Artist with an active concert schedule. The full program of his debut album will consist of works by Schubert and Liszt, including the latter’s Dante Sonata (“a musical inferno”), the second book of Années de pèlerinage (Italie), and Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy (release date October 23).
The next two announced releases will feature Igor Levit. There is a program of Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony No. 3 in Liszt’s piano transcription, alongside Schoenberg’s Ode to Napoleon – clearly an anti-tyrant theme. And then there is Erik Satie’s Vexations, apparently the entire work – which means at least 12 hours (840 repetitions of a single page of music). It isn’t clear whether this will be an all-new recording, or a re-master of the COVID era recording from May 30-31 2000 that we can watch on YouTube. Here is a short edit version of that (a streaming single on No Silence is promised, “coming soon.”
As I understand it (inference so far), there will be a limited-edition physical version (840 copies, appropriately) of the marathon Vexations performance, in addition to streaming. As an innovative twist, a tiny “NFC” chip, near field communication like tapping your phone to pay for stuff, will be embedded in the disc package. You will hold your phone near the album package, as if to pay… and something will happen (we aren’t told what, yet). I’m kind of expecting it might just link you to the full 12-hour audio in high resolution, or something like that, but perhaps I’m thinking too small!
