Igor Levit

The pianist Igor Levit, who was born in 1987 in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia, began playing the piano at the age of three. In 1995, his family moved to Germany, where he continued his studies with Karl-Heinz Kämmerling, Matti Raekallio, and Bernd Goetzke in Hannover before training with Hans Leygraf at the Mozarteum Salzburg. His international career took off in 2005 when he won no fewer than four prizes at the Rubinstein Competition in Tel Aviv. Nowadays, Levit performs all over the world and concertizes with the finest orchestras. In the 2024-25 season, he took part in Christian Thielemann’s inaugural concert with the Staatskapelle Berlin. He performed a Prokofiev cycle with the Budapest Festival Orchestra under Iván Fischer in the spring und was the soloist in Busoni’s monumental piano concerto with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. Additionally, he went on a tour with the Vienna Philharmonic to Hamburg and Budapest, collaborated in chamber music with Renaud Capuçon and Julia Hagen, and gave numerous recitals that took him to New York and Los Angeles. His performances and recording of the complete cycle of Beethoven’s 32 sonatas have received widespread acclaim in recent years. Levit has served as Co-Artistic Director of the Heidelberger Frühling since 2022 and, from 2023 to 2025, he curated a Piano Fest at Lucerne Festival spanning three years. Levit’s recordings have won numerous awards. In the fall of 2024, he released the two Brahms piano concertos with the Vienna Philharmonic under Thiele­mann. In 2022 the documentary film Igor Levit — No Fear was released in cinemas, following his 2021 book Hauskonzert. His accolades include the Gilmore Artist Award (2018), the Beethoven Prize (2020), the Carl von Ossietzky Prize (2022), the Buber Rosenzweig Medal (2024), the German National Prize (2024), the Kaiser Otto Prize, and the Schiller Prize of the City of Marbach (both in 2025). Since 2019, he has been Professor of Piano at the University of Music, Drama, and Media in Hanover.

Lucerne Festival debut on 11 September 2011 as the soloist in Scriabin’s Prométhée with the London Philharmonic Orchestra under Vladimir Jurowski.

August 2025