Michaël Lévinas

about

Michaël Lévinas (b. 18 April 1949) is a pianist and composer, born in Paris, France. He was the son of the philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas. Marguerite Long encouraged him to become a pianist and he entered the Paris Conservatoire as a pupil of Lazare Lévy at the age of five. He took first prizes in piano (Yvonne Loriod’s class), chamber music, accompaniment, and composition (Messiaen’s class). He has an international reputation as a concert pianist, in particular for his study of the works of Liszt and his complete recording of Beethoven’s sonatas. Co-director of the Paris-based ensemble L’Itinéraire (a collective of composers and performers), he has since 1973 championed the music of his contemporaries (Scelsi, George Crumb, Lachenmann). Having experienced the influence of Stockhausen, he turned to the aesthetics of ‘son sale’, altering pure sonorities from acoustic sources by various means: mechanical (Appels, 1974), magnetic (Concerto pour un piano éspace, 1976), electronic (Ouverture pour une fête étrange, 1979) and computerized (Préfixes, 1991). At IRCAM in the early 1990s he worked on hybridizing the characteristic features of different instrumental sounds (crossing a trombone with a bass drum, or a soprano’s laugh with the eddy of a cymbal, for example). The outcome of these researches manifests itself in his opera Go-gol (1996), after Gogol’s story The Overcoat. Lévinas’s aesthetic is enriched by a sense of the fantastic (Réminiscences d'un jardin férique, 1987), supp

top songs

albums

Debussy : Oeuvres pour piano

Lévinas: Par-delà

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50 Plus Grands Succès : Musique baroque

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Bach-Le clavier bien tempere (livres 1 & 2)

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Bach-Le clavier bien tempere (livres 1 2)

Carnaval - Etudes Symphoniques - Papillons

Beethoven : Variations Diabelli

Lévinas: Voûtes

Schubert : Wandererfantasie, D. 760 - Sonata, D. 960

Levinas: La Métamorphose - Je, tu, il

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Scriabine-Etudes pour piano (integrale)

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Beethoven : Les Sonates pour piano

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