Igor Levit is one of the finest emerging pianists. He does not mince his words about rising intolerance in Western Europe The pianist Igor Levit, Russian-born but now living in Germany, is not one to hang around. At 28, he has shown a willingness to confront early the greatest challenges in the repertoire. He came to prominence a year ago with a Sony recording of Beethoven’s late piano sonatas: dense, mentally gruelling, occasionally delirious works, which many artists defer until their maturity. Beethoven’s audiences in the post-Napoleonic right-wing reaction of the Metternich era thought them incomprehensible, though that is perhaps because it was their smugness Beethoven was railing at. Beethoven had been silent for a stretch, but the Vienna Congress of 1814-15, in his hom