Igor Levit is not shy of taking on the big issues when he goes into the recording studio. With his 2018 album Life he dealt with the subject of death, then two years later Encounter looked at transcendence. Now, in his latest project Tristan he examines the links between love, death and redemption.

Igor Levit

The keystone for this spellbinding new recording is, as its title suggests, Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, specifically the Prelude to the opening act with its infamous “Tristan chord” and how it changed so much music that followed. Through this prism Levit has built a program of five works – two by Wagner’s father-in-law Liszt, a stunning transcription of the Adagio from Mahler’s Tenth Symphony by the late Scottish pianist Ronald Stevenson and, most significantly, only the second recorded performance of Hans Werner Henze’s 1973 homage, Tristan, Preludes for Orchestra and Tape, for which Levit is joined by the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig conducted by Franz Welser-Most.

Writing about the work’s Prologue, Henze, a communist activist, said: “Wagner’s music has an incandescent and exclusive quality, something totalitarian. Mine is cool, as if it were early morning, and the...