Robert Levin talks Mozart
The depth of Robert Levin’s knowledge — of Mozart, above all — and his insistence on sharing it with you as vividly as he knows how, make for lively conversation when we meet in Los Angeles prior to his performances of Mozart’s K595 with the LA Philharmonic under young British conductor Daniel Harding.
Listeners are becoming increasingly aware of Levin’s cheeky presence through his recently completed Beethoven concerto cycle (Archiv, 1/00) with the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique under Sir John Eliot Gardiner — and his ongoing traversal, for Decca, of all Mozart’s music for piano and orchestra in collaboration with Christopher Hogwood and AAM, with Levin improvising the cadenzas in the concertos.
‘I used a different piano for each of the Beethoven concertos,’ he says, ‘and five different instruments for Mozart. In Salzburg recently, we recorded K450 and K537 on Mozart’s own Walter piano, which had never been recorded with an orchestra before. The next release will be K482 and K488 on an Anton Walter copy by Christopher Clarke and then K449, 451 and 175 on another Walter copy. The pianos are chosen for their timbral suitability to the respective pieces.’
So where lies the origins of this American pianist-scholar’s interest in improvisation and embellishment?
‘In 1966, as a teenager, I studied conducting with Hans Swarowsky and he played me this extraordinary Mozart concerto recording by Friedrich Gulda in which he improvised the cadenzas and embellished all over the place. I’d never heard anything like it. Later, when in that spirit I first started making my own additions to the concertos, some people found it odd, to say the least. A critic in San Francisco wrote, “Would you want your daughter to marry a man who tried to improve on Mozart?” It was a good line, I guess. But I did marry someone’s daughter...’ At which point, right on cue, Levin introduces me to his wife, the pianist Ya-Fei Chuang. ‘My other preoccupation, completing works that mozart left in fragmentary form, started during my undergraduate days at Harvard [on whose faculty Levin now serves]. A fellow student was conducting the Mozart Requiem and asked me to complete the sketch of an Amen fugue that appeared in the Mozart Edition score. It seemed a lunatic idea. How disrespectful!’
‘But then l thought, it’s not like taking a hammer and chisel to an unfinished Michelangelo sculpture. The music will remain and I could learn a lot about Mozart. So I made my first attempt at reproducing Mozart. Later, I decided to write a thesis on his unfinished works. I proposed to go to Europe, find manuscripts, make sure the publishes editions were accurate and do concert completions.’
Since then, Levin has completed a dozen Mozart works at least, including the Requiem itself, the Horn Concerto in D, K412, and the Symphonia concertante, K297b — all of which have been recorded. Is his progressive style still a problem when he works with a conductor for the first time? Seldom. Most are more worried about how they’ll get the orchestra back in at the end of my improvised cadenza. But it’s the easiest thing on earth. I just nod a bar before the end, and they beat the last bar. And then they relax. But conductors can be wary of me the first time around. Bernard Haitink, for instance, wondered if I wanted to change all the bowings. I said not at all. It’s our performance. And I hope you’ll enjoy yourself. Improvising cadenzas has nothing to do with feeling that what Mozart wrote isn’t good enough,’ says Levin. ‘But everybody knows the composer’s own cadenzas, so there isn’t the element of surprise that’s supposed to be part of the listening experience. I’ve decided that even though people will eventually know every note of what I’ve improvised in the recordings, it’s still like a snapshot of a live performance. I improvise a different cadenza at every take and leave the Producer to decide which one he wants for the final CD.
In a major recording project taking several years, there are bound to be changes in the relationship between soloist, conductor and orchestra. How is that expressed in the Mozart concertos?
‘Chris Hogwood is a low-key kind of person,’ says Levin, ‘and doesn’t wave the stick in people’s noses. He’s vastly knowledgeable, and has this phenomenally responsive orchestra and an unerring sense of musical character, which makes things easy for me as a soloist. He becomes freer as time passes, in making interpretive glosses, but also provides an anchor against which I can pull.’
What of other recent — non-Mozart — recordings, such as Levin’s recent Archiv release of Beethoven chamber music, which included a hitherto unpublished version of the G major concerto for piano and string quartet? ‘It’s an amazing piece,’ he says, ‘because Beethoven changed the piano part, beefing it up. There’s a recording with Mackerras [and pianist Mikhail Kazakevich] which had variant readings of the concerto without realizing they were in fact created specifically for the chamber version.’
But the pull of Mozart is too strong — even for me — and I remind Levin of a seemingly outrageous remark he’d made in a recent interview: ‘I want to be the Franco Zeffirelli, Howard Hawks and Cecil B de Mille of Mozart.’ Levin is uncharacteristically at a loss (at first): ‘I really said that? Hell, why not? I guess I invoked those names as a way of saying that Mozart was the showman of his age. He printed the tickets, sent out the invitations, moved his piano into the hall he’d rented, hired musicians, wrote the score, then came in and improvised ... In a certain sense in his music, he shows an attenuated attention-span, leaping from flirtatious to expressive, from tender to sardonic, terrified to relieved — and sometimes it happened four times in 10 seconds. If you can see how important that is to his music then it’s exhausting to listen to a Mozart concerto. And when music hits you in so many places, so quickly, it’s like an action movie!’
Robert Levin was interviewed by Herbert Glass for Gramophone magazine (February 2000 edition). This interview is reproduced by the kind permission of both parties.