Kissinger piano Olymp: a second Igor Levit?

17-year-old Yoav Levanon, runner-up in 2020, shows what he has learned over the past year: freedom, wit and greatness.

See again after nine months: Sergey Tanin (right) and Yoav Levanon, the first and time-placed winner of the Kissinger Piano Olympics 2020. Photo: Gerhild Ahnert

They were the winner and runner-up at the Piano Olympics 2020: Sergey Tanin from Russia, who began his studies in Moscow and is currently continuing in Basel, and Yoav Levanon, born in Israel in 2004 and studying there in addition to an already amazing international career - with in other words: the oldest and the youngest in last year's competition. It was now interesting to see how the two have developed. The result was a bit irritating. Because you couldn't help but get the impression that the younger one had passed the older one.

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.......17-year-old Yoav Levanon has made a remarkable leap forward. In this age of rapid development, this is no art either. Of course, he still travels with supervisors because he - still not - is of legal age. But a recognizable process of emancipation has set in, which can already be seen in the fact that he develops a sense of humor, that he can even laugh on stage.

Own design

The development was so clear because the two programs allowed a comparison with Sergey Tanin. Joav Levanon also played a series of character pieces, namely Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy's "Variations sérieuses" op. 54. Basically, these are etudes on a theme. But when composing, Mendelssohn avoided the proximity of the dry academy, and Yoav Levanon has become astonishingly free in the last nine months and has developed his own creative will beyond the teacher's opinion. And so, with a design that was highly differentiated in terms of attack and agogics, he managed to turn the 17 variations into little stories that stimulate the imagination and, moreover, to give them a consistent context.

And Yoav Levanon also played Robert Schumann: his large, four-movement Fantasia, Op. 17. There he showed a great feeling for the music, but also for the composer. On the one hand, he did not interpret the term "fantasy" as a license to be blurred, non-committal or aloof, but rather it was extraordinarily clear, in long arcs and vivid sound images with a freedom that pointed a bit in the direction of improvisation without leaving the musical text . Above all, however, he succeeded in bringing the composer and his moods to life with a play rich in contrasts: Robert Schumann fighting for his Clara.

He achieved this not only by creating moods and their fluctuations, but also by clearly working out quotations that Schumann had deliberately set, for example from the "Scenes from Children". Yoav Levanon made the composer's striving clearest with the special emphasis on a Beethoven quote that runs through the entire composition: "Take them, then, these songs". Schumann must have felt understood.

Yoav Levanon's humor was also evident in Sonata No. 1 by the Australian Carl Vine (* 1954). Then he came on stage with a velvet tailcoat and bow tie, like a bar pianist - not least to show that he was now moving in a completely different time and sphere. And the music also seemed a bit like a circus: hardly anything melodic, but mountains of chords in blocks and backs, the keyboard up and down to the point of dissolution, preferably in fortissimo, but dissolving in morendo. That sounds like ready-to-wear and quick boredom, but the young man also managed to differentiate here and made the technical implementation exciting with his enormous access.

And finally, after a short encore, Yoav Levanon did something that no one had thought of before: He stepped to the ramp, thanked the organizers of the Kissinger Sommer and the Piano Olympics for their work and played Franz Liszt's "Campanella" especially for them. Last year the young man was runner-up in the Piano Olympics: maybe he was just there a year early. One should keep an eye on him. The meanwhile most famous competition runner-up was Igor Levit.

Article by: Thomas Ahnert     Published by: Saale-Zeitung

Bad Kissingen 6/28/2021