This latest release from the pianist and activist Igor Levit is his personal response to the atrocities of 7 October. ‘It is my artistic reaction, as a person, as a musician, as a Jew, to what I have felt in the last few weeks and months,’ he writes. ‘Or to put it more precisely, it is one of many reactions that came to mind.’ Levit and his team have given their time pro-bono, and his proceeds will be donated to two German organisations fighting anti-Semitism - OFEK Advice Center for Anti-Semitic Violence and Discrimination and the Kreuzberg Initiative Against Anti Semitism.

His means of expressing his feelings about the horrifying massacre is to turn to the music of two Jewish composers (at least, the Protestant Mendelssohn was born into a family of Jewish heritage). Levit has selected a programme of 14 pieces from six books of Songs without Words ordered chronologically and beginning with the very first, the sublime Op 19b No 1. We immediately get a taste of his approach: a rather distant mic placement (certainly not intimate), a lot of pedal and little rubato. It doesn’t do to add extra sugar to these little bonbons and Levit lets the music speak for itself, to create its own effect. Is the left-hand accompaniment too prominent? Yes – and it becomes an unwanted feature. The clue is in the title. The melody, whether it be a ‘Venetian Gondola Song’ (all three are included here), the lovely ‘Duetto’ or ‘Folk Song’, must always sing above or below the accompaniment. Roberto Prosseda in his masterly set of Mendelssohn’s complete piano works (Decca – to say nothing of Ignaz Friedman and Walter Gieseking in their respective selections) sings without words not only more effectively but with a great deal more charm, an element entirely lacking in Levit’s hands. Melancholy, yearning and misery are here in abundance, but optimism and consolation are to be found here as well.

But – a big but – Levit ends with Alkan’s ‘La chanson de la folle au bord de la mer’ (roughly translated as ‘Song of the madwoman on the seashore’), the eighth of his 25 Préludes, Op 31. This extraordinary, visionary piece was published in 1847, though it might just as easily have been written yesterday. Is there another short piano work of such intense desolation and nihilism? Levit, in this haunting account, seems to invoke Othello’s great cry of despair: ‘But yet the pity of it, Iago! O Iago, the pity of it, Iago!’ If you have been undecided, just these last six minutes might persuade you to buy the download of this album – and contribute to Levit’s causes.