Michaël Lévinas

Michaël Lévinas (Paris, 1949) is a French pianist and composer, the son of the philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas. His output combines the performance of Romantic and Classical repertoire with the composition of contemporary music, a field in which he played a prominent role in France in the second half of the twentieth century.

His training began early. Marguerite Long encouraged him to take up the piano and, at the age of five, he entered the Paris Conservatoire as a pupil of Lazare Lévy. There he won first prizes in piano, in the class of Yvonne Loriod, in chamber music, accompaniment and composition, the last under Messiaen. As a performer he achieved international recognition, above all for his study of Liszt's music and for his complete recording of the Beethoven sonatas. Since 1973 he has been co-director of the Parisian ensemble L'Itinéraire, a collective of composers and performers, and since then he has championed the music of his contemporaries, among them Scelsi, Crumb and Lachenmann.

After an initial phase marked by the influence of Stockhausen, he turned towards the aesthetic of the "son sale", which alters pure sonorities drawn from acoustic sources through mechanical, magnetic, electronic and computer-based processes. Examples include Appels (1974), Concerto pour un piano espace (1976), Ouverture pour une fête étrange (1979) and Préfixes (1991). In the early 1990s he worked at IRCAM on the hybridisation of characteristic features of different instrumental timbres. This research culminated in his opera Go-gol (1996), based on Gogol's short story The Overcoat.

His aesthetic also incorporates a sense of the fantastic, visible in Réminiscences d'un jardin férique (1987), together with an affinity for birds and for the myth of the Ascension, present in Résonances polyphoniques (1985). His legacy lies at the intersection of the pianistic tradition and experimentation with sound, with a body of work that spans musical theatre, orchestral music, chamber music and vocal works.