I’ve been listening to Igor Levit’s Gramophone category winning album of Beethoven piano sonatas A LOT this week. Hitherto Beethoven’s creations for the keyboard have presented themselves as a marathon to get through. This week they’ve made sense of the world. They’ve also been things I’ve wanted to return to like a snack in the kitchen cupboard, or a stinky cheese in the fridge. They are, assuming you don’t know this already, works that must be listened to. Especially Levits release on Sony. (Biss on Orchard, I’ll get to you in due course.)
In other (startling) news given that we’ve all been briefed to style this COVID thing out for another six months yet, is that the Malta International Music Festival have announced a jaw-dropping line-up for their 2021 festival including Martha Argerich.
Others signed up include Rudolf Buchbinder, Gautier Capuçon, Danielle De Niese, Daniel Hope, Gidon Kremer, Denis Matsuev, Andreas Ottensammer, Grigory Sokolov and Maxim Vengerov. Lawks.
COVID hasn’t had a massive impact on Malta it seems, and if memory serves me correctly there’s a considerable Russian diaspora in Malta eager and able to facilitate live performance in April. It seems almost impossible to imagine that it could. I do hope it does.
In the meantime, the six month wait. I woke up this morning hearing rain through the curtains and bedroom window, finding it difficult to contemplate what next year might look like. I’m lucky, of course. I won’t starve. But l, the wait for socially distancing being a thing of the past seems like a long long way off.
