2005

Lecture-Recitals

Stefan Litwin's lecture-recitals have long since achieved - there is no other way to put it - cult status.

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 2005

2001

As if Beethoven Himself Sat at the Piano

A Revelation: Stefan Litwin at the Schauspielhaus

Precisely what is special about this evening casts a dismal light on concert routine: Beethoven's Piano Concert No. 1, this time played, not by a pianist, but by a musician.

Stefan Litwin is his name, and in his performance with the Berlin Symphony Orchestra and Gielen he does just about everything differently from the hundreds of piano laborers whose Beethoven presentations usually resemble each other as much as one tuxedo the other. [...]

His playing of Beethoven is a revelation that need not fear comparison with Rattle's "Pastoral" of last week, whose primary characteristics - the exploration of historical performance practice and the fusion of a thoroughly calculated artistic statement with the (seeming) spontaneity of the moment - also define Litwin's playing: staccato playing, transparent sound, and the balance of registers with a crisp, rhythmically vibrant bass, take us to the present directly from the forte-piano of Beethoven's era; Litwin colors them with magnificently rich Steinway tone.

One can almost believe Beethoven himself were sitting at the piano, so fresh and improvisational does Litwin's playing sound.

Jörg Königsdorf, Berliner Tagesspiegel, 2001

1993

New Land Beyond Romanticism

Michael Gielen and Stefan Litwin in the Alten Oper

The interpretation of Beethoven's C minor concert was downright sensational: with Litwin, no cloudy "romantic" virtuoso concert, but crystal-clear "chamber music with the piano". [...]

The concept of the Beethoven solo concert must be reconsidered - and Litwin and Gielen provide an exemplary occasion for this.

Hans-Klaus Jungheinrich, Frankfurter Rundschau, 1993

2003

Technical Brilliance

The second piano sonata by Ives, "Concord, Mass. 1840-1860", a key work on the intellectual center of New England's Transcendentalism, is a hypercomplex piece that really demands a man with two brains and three hands.

Stefan Litwin mastered it as if it were the simplest thing in the world: complementing each other in ideal manner were technical brilliance, musical understanding, a sure sense of construction, and a kind of actor's art of transformation in the often abrupt changes in the heterogeneous layers of material and mood.

But what is decisive is the seriousness with which Litwin plumbs the dignity of expression of the individual characters. Litwin plays nothing that he hasn't understood, and he seems to know at every moment what he wants to "say" musically.

Julia Spinola, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 2003

2000

Superior Perfectionist

Stefan Litwin, who carried out the gigantic piano sonata by Jean Barraqué, proved himself a superior perfectionist. Without palpable involvement or effort, but with inexorable precision, he worked through the demanding 45-minute opus.

Albrecht Dümling, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 2000

2003

For a Few Fingers More

On the world premiere of Gielen's "recycling der glocken" (recycling the bells) in Berlin

The pianistic added value can hardly be grasped. Sometimes it sounds, and looks, as if the pianist, already facing a great challenge for a virtuoso, would have to grow another five to ten fingers.

Stefan Litwin is not only one of the few thinking pianists who know how to bridle, including technically, such a "warhorse". Around this spectacular world premiere he also arranged one of his intelligent programs, in which cross-references are as meaningful as they are rich in leaps in knowledge.

Eleonore Büning, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 2003

2005

Wars of Liberation, Black on White

Stefan Litwin analyzes and plays Ludwig van Beethoven's C Major Piano Concert

For Litwin, interpreting means, in the emphatic sense, explicating - musically as well as in words. This is why he loves and cultivates the lecture-recital form already practiced by Walter Levin and Charles Rose. Everyone who has ever experienced Litwin on the stage knows that he is a brilliant speaker. But that his lectures are as stirring as they are illuminating is because nothing in them is learned ornamentation; all of it is argumentation.

Nothing makes the inherent life and expressive overflowing of the works clearer than Litwin's own musical interpretation of the C major concert. The conflicts of the first movement, its melting utopia of freedom, and the yearning romance of the middle movement with its touching waltz episode, which on this recording is finally played out in a "Viennese" manner, as well as the Janissary music of the concluding rondo, which are full of willfullnesses - in Litwin's recording, all of this takes on a plasticity, forcefulness, and eloquence that makes all interpretive theory suddenly seem pale again. What more could one want?

Julia Spinola, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 2005

1998

Hommage à Pierre Boulez - Alte Oper Frankfurt

This Mexico City-born specialist in New Music for the piano has achieved something enormous; he was a master of the balanced employment of the keyboard, not weighted by hands, precisely with the notations and the sonata of Boulez.

Much of Boulez, for example the second movement of the sonata or some of the twelve-beat bars, demands a machine precision as with Ligeti, but Litwin fuses this manual skill with an incredible elegance and smoothness.

He must be a pianist completely to Pierre Boulez' taste: clean and painstaking in dealing with sounds, precise to hard in his touch, calm, even easy-going on questions of form. And completely himself, without any extravagance.

Stefan Schickhaus, Main-Echo, 1998