With an alert and critical mind, Igor Levit places his art in the context of social events and understands it as inseparably linked to them. The New York Times describes Igor Levit as one of the “most important artists of his generation”, the New Yorker as a pianist “like no other”.

As contribution to the Beethoven Year 2027 and building on his past successes in Salzburg and Hamburg in 2019 and 2020, Igor Levit returns to his acclaimed cycle of all Beethoven sonatas. The cycles, each comprising eight recitals, can be experienced from October 2026 to June 2028 in New York, London, Vienna, Berlin, Munich, Hamburg and North Rhine-Westphalia. Further recitals in the 2026-27 season featuring Beethoven sonatas will take Levit to Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Hannover, Katowice, Leipzig, Lisbon, Nuremberg, Milan, Paris, Prague, Rome, Warsaw, Zurich as well as on a North American tour. With Sir Antonio Pappano and the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, he performs at the Nobel Prize Concert in Stockholm in December 2026.

Igor Levit’s recordings have been honored with countless awards, including four Opus Klassik Awards, Gramophone‘s ‘Artist of the Year 2020‘-Award, Musical America’s ‘Recording Artist of the Year 2020‘ as well as the ‘Recording of the Year‘-Award and the Instrumental Award of the BBC Music Magazine. The first complete recording of Igor Levit’s Beethoven piano sonatas, released by Sony Classical in September 2019, immediately reached number 1 in the official classical charts.

Since the 2022-23 season, Igor Levit is the Co-Artistic Director of the music festival Heidelberger Frühling. With the Lucerne Festival he initiated the “Piano Fest” one year later. Together with performance artist Marina Abramović, Igor Levit presented a 13-hour performance of Erik Satie’s ‘Vexations’ at London’s Southbank Centre in spring 2025 – 10 years earlier, the two had already performed Bach’s Goldberg Variations together at the Park Avenue Armory in New York. In spring 2021 Hanser published Igor Levit’s first book “House Concert”, co-authored by Florian Zinnecker followed in Fall 2022 by the release of the feature documentary “Igor Levit – No Fear” in cinemas and on DVD.

Born in Nizhni Novgorod, Igor Levit moved to Germany with his family at the age of eight. Igor Levit completed his piano studies in Hannover 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. In spring 2019 he was appointed professor for piano at his alma mater, the University of Music, Theatre and Media Hanover.

Igor Levit was the youngest participant in the 2005 International Arthur Rubinstein Competition in Tel Aviv, where he won silver, the special prize for chamber music, the audience prize and the special prize for the best performance of contemporary pieces. In 2018 Igor Levit has been named the eighth recipient of the prestigious “Gilmore Artist Award” – conferred only every four years to a classical pianist and recognized as the largest and one of the world’s most distinguished music awards.

For his political commitment Igor Levit has been awarded the 5th International Beethoven Prize in 2019 followed by the award of the “Statue B” of the International Auschwitz Committee in January 2020. His 53 Twitter-streamed live house concerts during the lockdown in spring 2020 garnered a worldwide audience, offering a sense of community and hope in a time of isolation and desperation. In October 2020 Igor Levit was recognized with the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. In Berlin, where he makes his home, Igor Levit is playing on a Steinway D Grand Piano kindly given to him by the Trustees of Independent Opera at Sadler’s Wells.