Biography
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.
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Lévinas’s aesthetic is enriched by a sense of the fantastic (Réminiscences d'un jardin férique, 1987), supported by a liking for birds and the myth of the Ascension (Résonances polyphoniques, 1985).
Biography text from Last.fm, available under CC BY-SA.