Igor Levit

Born in Nizhni Novgorod in 1987, Igor Levit moved to Germany with his family at the age of eight. He graduated from his piano studies in Hanover with the highest score in the history of the institute. His teachers included Karl-Heinz Kämmerling, Matti Raekallio, Bernd Goetzke, Lajos Rovatkay and Hans Leygraf. As the youngest participant, Igor Levit won not only silver at the 2005 International Arthur Rubinstein Competition in Tel Aviv, but also the special prize for chamber music, the audience prize and the special prize for the best performance of the contemporary compulsory piece.

Igor Levit's first complete recording of Beethoven's piano sonatas, released by Sony Classical in September 2019, immediately reached No. 1 in the official classical music charts. Igor Levit has presented cycles of Beethoven's complete piano sonatas at the Salzburg Festival, the Lucerne Festival as well as the Musikfest Berlin, at Hamburg's Elbphilharmonie and at London's Wigmore Hall, among others. Recitals regularly take Igor Levit to the world's most important concert halls and festivals. In the summer of 2022, Igor Levit opened the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival together with Alan Gilbert and the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra. This will be followed by recitals at the Salzburg Festival and the Lucerne Festival and, together with the Orchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia and Sir Antonio Pappano, performances at the Musikfest Berlin and the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg. In the 2022/23 season, Igor Levit will present his new recital program on a major tour of Germany and on the most important concert stages in Europe and the USA, including London, Madrid, Milan, New York, Paris, Prague, and Rome. The Musikverein Vienna is dedicating a comprehensive portrait to Igor Levit. As Artist in Residence, he has been invited to spend several weeks with the San Francisco Symphony under the direction of its principal conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen in June 2023.

In spring 2019, he was appointed professor of piano at his alma mater, the Hanover University of Music, Drama and Media. Since spring 2022, Igor Levit has been co-artistic director of the International Music Festival Heidelberger Frühling. With the Lucerne Festival, he has created the multi-day "Piano Festival," which will take place for the first time in May 2023. For his political commitment, Igor Levit was awarded the 5th International Beethoven Prize in 2019. This was followed in January 2020 by the award of the "Statue B" of the International Auschwitz Committee on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. His 53 house concerts streamed on the short messaging service Twitter during the spring 2020 lockdown resonated worldwide. For the House Concerts as a sign of hope and community spirit in times of isolation and despair, as well as for his commitment against antisemitism, Igor Levit was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in the fall of 2020.

As of August 2022