House Concert
by Igor Levit and Florian Zinnecker
Polity Books, 2023
ISBN 978-1509553556
With his debut at Carnegie Hall postponed indefinitely by COVID, virtuoso Russian-German pianist Igor Levit didn’t have anywhere to perform. So he made his own stage at home, in Berlin.
In House Concert, journalist and Die Zeit deputy desk manager Florian Zinnecker explores the transformation of Levit’s career during the pandemic. His livestreams—a series of house concerts broadcast from his living room on Twitter—kept the musician sane, but they also encouraged him to break out of classical performance traditions and carve his own musical journey.
Combined with Levit’s unprecedented performances of Frederic Rzewski’s The People United Will Never Be Defeated! and the 24-hour marathon of Erik Satie’s 840-variation Vexations, as well as his vocal campaign against anti-Semitism, the performer is framed as a wild card in the world of classical music.
House Concert is written in an equally unprecedented style. Translated by Shaun Whiteside, there are no chapters to divide the book; the past and present are woven into a single narrative, but the variation in scene-setting details, interesting anecdotes, and one-on-one conversations keeps the book engaging. Zinnecker’s brief present-day conversations with Levit turn into explorations of the musician’s childhood; his struggles against self-doubt, tough teachers, and anti-Semitic discrimination; his difficulty finding work in the classical performance industry; and his musical inspirations.
Occasionally, the unusual format makes it difficult to remember how people relate to Levit. This is noticeable when Zinnecker writes about how the late artist Hannes Malte Mahler impacted Levit’s life, since this section feels tangentially related to the surrounding scenes; it would have made much more sense when Mahler was relevant 50 pages earlier. In the middle parts of the book, where Zinnecker plays around with dialogue formatting, it’s sometimes difficult to tell who is talking about.
Ultimately, however, House Concert is a heartfelt and inspiring journey about a musician’s self-discovery when the world fell to pieces in the early 2020s.
