Igor Levit was born in Gorky, now Nizhny Novgorod, on 10 March 1987 into a Jewish family, and started at the piano at three with his mother Elena, a piano teacher and répétiteur who had studied in the line of Heinrich Neuhaus. The family moved to Hannover in 1995; he studied at the Salzburg Mozarteum with Hans Leygraf in 1999–2000 and then from 2000 to 2010 in Hannover with Karl-Heinz Kämmerling, Matti Raekallio and Bernd Goetzke. He took the silver medal and three further awards at the Rubinstein Competition in Tel Aviv in 2005, was a BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist from 2011 to 2013, and has been a professor in Hannover since 2019. He lives in Berlin.

His recorded work centres on Bach, Beethoven and Liszt but reaches well beyond them, taking in Shostakovich’s 24 Preludes and Fugues, Ronald Stevenson’s Passacaglia on DSCH, Frederic Rzewski’s The People United Will Never Be Defeated! and Morton Feldman’s Palais de Mari — a repertoire that treats the extended variation form as a political as much as a musical subject. He won the Gilmore Artist Award in 2018 and was Gramophone’s Artist of the Year in 2020, when his Beethoven also took the instrumental category. He is publicly active on human rights and against antisemitism, and in 2021 contributed a piano version of Metallica’s Nothing Else Matters to the charity album The Metallica Blacklist.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igor_Levit
• https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q100759