On his new double album, Fantasia, Igor Levit performs four paradigmatic works spanning a period of almost two centuries from 1720 to 1910. For Igor Levit these works “have something incredibly expansive about them, their frequent intimacy notwithstanding. They are not only emotional but also instrumental.”

The starting point of all four works is the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, which for Igor Levit represents “maximal freedom and imagination and at the same time great rigour”. Igor Levit has chosen Bach’s exceptional Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue in D minor and combined it with Liszt’s B minor Sonata, a highly charged piece that at the time of its composition looked far ahead into the future (which Igor Levit is currently performing to great acclaim all over the world), together with Busoni’s Fantasia contrappuntistica, in which Busoni perpetuated the Bach tradition, and Alban Berg’s only Piano Sonata.

These four major works are complemented by four shorter pieces that for Igor Levit provide “lead-ins that I feel intuitively are right”. These four shorter pieces are Alexander Siloti’s arrangement of the famous Air from Bach’s Third Orchestral Suite, Liszt’s transcription of Schubert’s song Der Doppelgänger, Busoni’s Nuit de Noël and an early piano piece in B minor by Alban Berg.