Yoav Levanon, demonic angel of the piano

Par Bertrand BoissardLe 17 sept 2020

The young Israeli musician gave his first concert in France at the Piano aux Jacobins festival in Toulouse. A prodigy is born!

The term is so overused that people hesitate to use it. But, if there is someone who can be called a prodigy, it is Yoav Levanon – he started playing the piano at the age of three and was already performing on stage twelve months later. Now 16 and a half years old, he gave his very first concert in France on September 10 in Toulouse, as part of the Piano aux Jacobins festival.

Piano hurricanes

As a preamble, the Variations sérieuses ("Serious Variations") by Mendelssohn show an artist concerned with sound density, and capable of triggering piano hurricanes.

Yoav Levanon could have been satisfied with a Liszt Sonata well sent, polished and full of effects. But it is a groundswell that is breaking, of phenomenal intensity, bursting with personality and inventiveness. From the beginning, astonishing nuances raise the ear, the ethereal episodes do not weigh down and the end, instead of getting bogged down, as is often the case under more pretentious fingers, goes like a dream. The return of the grandioso theme has flamboyant accents that remind of Horowitz – excuse the pun. Caught in very fast tempi, the work-world passes like a hallucination..

All-round endurance

Which encore to play after such a score? It will be first – the nice idea – the Feuillet d'album by Scriabin. From the outset, the musician finds the sound specific to this fragile and luminescent universe. After La Campanella by Liszt, one of the most diabolical and precise ever heard in concert, the deflagrations of Chopin's Etude in octaves come out of the backstage world. There is no doubt that the young artist, of unfailing endurance, could have followed on from the eleven others in opus 25.

In spite of extraordinary means, Yoav Levanon is not only a stunning virtuoso. His assertive interpretative choices already make him an authentic musician, who has everything to become one of the major pianists of this century.

Toulouse, Cloitre des Jacobins, le 10 septembre.