Pianist Robert Levin: ‘Mozart was restlessly creative, with a kind of attention deficit disorder’

Imagine the air of anticipation at the Mehlgrube casino in Vienna on February 11 1785. The building would have been a hive of activity, with people eating at the restaurant on the ground floor and playing at gaming tables in adjoining rooms, while an audience packed with members of the aristocracy gathered for a concert in the hall on the second floor.

The highlight was to be the premiere of a piano concerto by Mozart, No 20 in D minor (K466), played by the composer. We know the high expectations that preceded Mozart’s appearances in Vienna from contemporary accounts, but on this occasion the frisson of suspense was probably not limited to the audience. On the morning of the concert the orchestral parts were still being copied, so one wonders how the musicians felt about the impending performance.

“One of the things people need to realise is that there was next to no rehearsal done,” says Robert Levin, fortepianist and expert in period performance practice, whose long-running series of recordings of all Mozart’s piano concertos with the Academy of Ancient Music reaches its culmination later this month.

According to Leopold Mozart, the composer’s father, the concert was “magnificent” and the orchestra played “splendidly”, which is hard to believe, as by the standards of the day the orchestral parts in Mozart’s mature concertos, wind especially, were unusually intricate. In a letter to his daughter, Leopold adds: “Your brother did not even have time to play through [the rondo], as he had to supervise the copying.”

The impression is of a performance on the wing. We know from surviving manuscripts of Mozart’s great concertos that lightly sketched passages in the solo part mean he was probably short of time when he was composing and would have improvised those sections on the night. Other decorations would have been added as he went.

This is the sense of adventure that Levin tries to capture in his own performances, which do not stick to the published score adopted by most pianists but introduce unexpected decorations and flights of imagination that make the music take wing. His recordings have been a 30-year journey and the final volume, the last of 13, will aptly end with the last concerto, No 27 in B flat (K595).

For its infectious sense of spontaneity, not to mention its completeness (the concertos for two and three pianos are included, together with sundry arrangements, standalone pieces and fragments), this cycle has set new standards. It marks a defining achievement in a career that has straddled scholarship and performance at the highest level. Levin served as professor of music at Harvard University for 20 years, has produced completions of works by JS Bach and Mozart, including the latter’s Requiem and Mass in C minor, and earlier this year was awarded the Golden Mozart Medal of the International Mozarteum Foundation. A book on Mozart’s piano concertos is in the pipeline.

The idea for the recordings came out of a British television series about improvisation called On the Edge, made by Jeremy Marre and Derek Bailey, in 1992. Marre had plenty of examples of improvisation in world music and jazz, but not so much to represent classical music. He asked Levin if there was anything he could offer and, off the cuff, Levin suggested a movement from a Mozart piano concerto. In the finished series Mozart found himself sitting alongside Indian singing, rap from Harlem and Nashville musicians such as Buddy Emmons and Eugene Chadbourne.

It is not so far from the spur-of-the-moment invention of a jazz jam session to the freedom of Mozart’s concerts in Vienna. “Jazz is an important part of my life, starting from my time as a student at Harvard,” says Levin. “I was inspired by jazz musicians of that era, like Art Tatum, King Oliver and Bill Evans, people whose performances from the heart moved me deeply and made me want to do something comparable in Mozart’s legacy.”

Early on in the Mozart series, some people made the complaint that the improvised passages would always be the same on disc, which may seem strange now. “If you buy the recording of Oscar Peterson playing at the Montreux Jazz Festival,” says Levin, “you hear the same thing every time you put on the recording, but you know it is improvised and that imparts a sense of spontaneity to what Peterson does.”

For Levin, risk-taking is by far the most important thing about his Mozart recordings. “These days we work laboriously at getting the surface of the music to be as brilliant and sure-fire as possible, and the idea that there are some acrobatics going on is not as much to the fore as I think it should be. It does involve a reasonable readiness for some kind of disaster to happen, but one has to take that risk.

“I imagine Mozart as being restlessly creative, with a kind of attention deficit disorder, so that he was too inventive” to play the music the same way twice. “Besides which, the idea of performing heritage works was not part of the zeitgeist then.”

In the decades that it has taken to complete this unique Mozart concerto cycle, there have been changes, not least Richard Egarr taking over as conductor following Christopher Hogwood’s death in 2014. Levin says that as the performers have come to know each other, they have pushed their improvisation further, and there have been some really “wacky things in the wind section” on some of the most recent discs.

“I have gotten a lot more courageous about improvisation over the years,” he says, “though I am still scared. When it is time for the cadenza, my heart rate goes through the roof, and there is nothing I can do about it. People have said to me, ‘You are getting too excited; try to be a bit more in control,’ but it is wonderful to think you are sharing the creative impulse in that involving way.”

The final disc in Robert Levin’s Mozart piano cycle is released on June 21

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Letter in response to this article:

Unlike pop music, Moz­art never goes out of style / From Nath­aniel Nor­man, New York, NY, US