Igor Levit likes to deal with big subjects, whether it’s late Beethoven or supreme Bach. Now he addresses something bigger still: life and death itself; though the set is titled ‘Life’, looking at the works list, you might be forgiven for thinking that ‘Death’ would have been a more apt name. The project itself grew from a personal tragedy, with the accidental death of a close friend of Levit’s. The resulting pair of discs are a formidable, perhaps even forbidding prospect and they demand intense concentration.

The album begins in the Stygian gloom of Busoni’s Fantasia after JS Bach – a work written in 1909 in memory of his father. Levit gives the piece a cloudier, more mysterious opening than Hamelin and his tempo is steadier. At the point where Busoni quotes Bach’s chorale melody, BWV766, Levit finds an apt solemnity, marvelling at each harmonic shift. Even in the biggest of climaxes, the sound never becomes overbearing, thanks as much to Sony’s stellar engineers as to the pianist himself. But it’s in the quieter moments that Levit’s musicianship is most telling – just sample the close of the Fantasia, with its air of quiet mystery.

The way Levit has formed this programme is extraordinarily effective. The Brahms reworking for left hand of Bach’s D minor violin Chaconne is a probing, introverted affair, and how effectively Levit can imbue a single line with light and shade; as the music ascends into the treble, there’s a real feeling of it coming into the light, too. You might prefer a more dramatic approach but this one has nobility in spades. Talking of coming into the light, that’s something that has been happening to Schumann’s long-neglected Ghost Variations. If Imogen Cooper brings to them a sense of inevitability and Anderszewski revels in their strangeness, Levit reveals something different again. He gives the theme an enormous sense of regret, while the repeated Ds in the fourth variation have a sense of grounding, in contrast to Anderszewski, who sees them as dramatic cries, leading to an agitated final variation, whereas Levit consoles with a yearning beauty.

From Schumann to Frederic Rzewski’s ‘A Mensch’, the third movement from Dreams, Part 1, and itself a memorial to the actor and poet Steve Ben Israel. Levit has already proved himself a supremely sympathetic champion of Rzewski and he captures the changeability of mood, from the reflective to the sardonically playful, bringing a sense of inevitability as idea follows idea.

Liszt dominates the second disc, beginning with a fine account of the Wagner Parsifal paraphrase. What comes next is even more striking: Busoni’s reimagining for piano of Liszt’s mighty organ work, the Fantasia and Fugue on the chorale Ad nos, ad salutarem undam. Levit, never hurried, whips up a veritable storm of sonorities, yet there’s always a clarity of thinking that allows him to guide us through the fullest of textures and most virtuoso of writing. He brings an intensity to the Adagio, which is grave and spacious in his hands. Ohlsson is notably faster here – perhaps more to my taste – yet Levit somehow manages to beguile through sheer conviction. The final Fugue is underpinned by a violent energy, and it’s only with the affirmative culminatory bars that the darkness is eventually banished.

From here to Liszt’s reworking of Wagner’s Liebestod, seductively voiced and ultimately unerringly soulful. Without late Liszt, Busoni’s Berceuse would have been unimaginable: one of his strangest utterances (in which the pianist is instructed to hold down both pedals throughout), it has a bitonal middle section and, throughout, Busoni achieves much with the sparest of means. Here, I do find Levit just a little too drawn-out compared to the masterly Hamelin. Bill Evans’s Peace Piece improvisation might seem an odd bedfellow but in fact it fits perfectly. Evans created it in a 1958 recording session and in his hands it has a directness that is inimitable (and shows how much he learnt not just from Debussy but from Messiaen too). That Levit manages to make it sound his own without betraying the original is tribute to his extraordinary artistry.

The essay by Anselm Cybinski forms the ideal counterpoint to the aural experience. This is a fascinating, compelling set that demands to be heard.