Igor Levit’s new album On DSCH is a 3CD discographic tour de force performed by “one of the essential artists of our time” (The New York Times). It is well known that the artist, who describes himself as a “maximalist,” likes to push his limits, both intellectual and physical. But this project devoted to two essential cycles of musical modernism overshadows all the others. Completed in 1951, Dmitri Shostakovich’s 24 Preludes and Fugues — a summary of all major and minor keys — last about two and a half hours in total, while Ronald Stevenson’s Passacaglia on DSCH, which he completed in 1963, is an uninterrupted set of variations lasting nearly an hour and a half. The letters DSCH spell out Shostakovich’s musical monogram using the German note names: D-Es-C-H = D-Eb-C-B. Levit himself describes the 24 Preludes and Fugues as “a kind of musical diary”: “There is something quite unique,” he says, “in this combination of warmth, immediacy and pure solitude. For me, it is a ritual of exploration and self-discovery that addresses the most intimate questions.” Ronald Stevenson (1928-2015), a Scottish composer with a utopian vision of life, set out to travel the world from his piano. The DSCH motif provided him with the basis for a spectacular exploration of all kinds of pianistic and stylistic possibilities over a period of more than three hundred variations. “The Passacaglia,” Levit believes, “is a true distillation of life, a kind of music that speaks to us about our responsibility toward the world as a whole.” The album artwork was specially created by the internationally renowned graphic designer and book designer Christoph Niemann, who regularly illustrates for The New Yorker and The New York Times. His illustration for On DSCH offers a playful and abstract counterpart to this musical experience.