Bright Circle is the most recent release from pianist Beth Levin. The March 2017 Navona recording features music by Brahms, Schubert, and David Del Tredici. WBAA's John Clare spoke to Levin about the new release, new music, and inspirations on social media.
Find out more about Bright Circle here, and about pianist Beth Levin here.
Brooklyn-based pianist Beth Levin is celebrated as a bold interpreter of challenging works, from the Romantic canon to leading modernist composers. The New York Times praised her “fire and originality,” while The New Yorker called her playing “revelatory.”
Debuting as a child prodigy with the Philadelphia Orchestra at age twelve, Levin was subsequently taught and guided by legendary pianists such as Rudolf Serkin, Leonard Shure and Dorothy Taubman, Another of her teachers, Paul Badura-Skoda, praised Levin as “a pianist of rarequalities and the highest professional caliber.” Her deep well of
experience allows an intuitive connection with the great pianistic traditions, to Bach, to Mozart, to Beethoven.
Critics hail the immediacy of her performances. “Levin plays with a rare percussive audacity, making notes and phrases that usually rush by in the background stand out in high relief,” writes Richard Brody in The
New Yorker. “Her choice of adventure over suaveness,” stated David Patrick Stearns of the Philadelphia Inquirer, “created a sense of barely controlled improvisation.”
