Igor Levit won the ›2018 Gilmore Artist Award‹ and the Royal Philharmonic Society’s ›Instrumentalist of the Year 2018‹ award. The New York Times describes him as one of the »essential artists of our time«. He is Artistic Director of the Chamber Music Academy and of the Heidelberger Frühling Standpunkte Festival. In early 2019, he became Professor of Piano at his Alma Mater, Hannover College of Music, Drama and Media.
The 2019/20 season is, for Igor Levit, all about Beethoven’s piano sonatas, which he released on Sony Classical at its beginning. It also marks the start of three cycles of the complete sonatas – at the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, at the Lucerne Festival and at the Konserthuset in Stockholm. To close the season, Levit is touring The States with a purely Beethoven programme which will see him play in locations such as Carnegie Hall in New York. At The Barbican in London, Igor Levit is the 2019/20 season’s ›Featured Artist‹. Alongside a tour with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, further engagements will follow, such as with the Gewandhaus Orchestra Leipzig, the Cleveland Orchestra and the London Philharmonic Orchestra.
Highlights of previous seasons include collaborations with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Berlin Philharmonic and the Staatskapelle Dresden as well as tours with the Bavarian State Orchestra, the Vienna Philharmonic and the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich.
Born in Nizhny Novgorod in 1987, Igor Levit moved to Germany with his family at the age of eight. He completed his degree in piano at Hannover where he obtained the highest possible score in the institute’s history. At home in Berlin, Levit plays a Steinway D concert grand – a gift from the ›Independent Opera at Sadler’s Wells‹ Foundation.