Word: mozarts
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...That Mozart is also the alter ego of senior music concentrator Robert Levin is no accident. Levin dates the loss of his musical virginity at the age of five and has been busily at work ever since. In the vocabulary of a prominent member of the Music Department, he has all the "equipment": perfect pitch, near-total recall, ability to read scores at sight, digital dexterity, and a catholic if necessarily incomplete cerebral storehouse of music from the 17th century to the present. At Harvard he has been chiefly occupied as classical music guru at WHRB, in addition to somewhat...
Saturday night Levin did his thing(s) before a full house at Sanders Theatre. The program, entiled "Works of W. A. Mozart," included the orchestral March in D, K. 335/1 (delightful in its naivete and ludicrous use of col legno), the Sonata for Violin and Piano in B flat, K. 454, and the magnificent Piano Concerto No. 25 in C, K. 503. Levin served as pianist and was joined at appropriate moments by violinist Rose Mary Harbison and an excellent pick-up orchestra conducted by John Harbison. By and large the performances were clean, tasteful and controlled, with occasional brilliance...
...concert's primary sources of drawing power, pace Mozart, were the two previously unfinished "torsos" which Levin had brought to completion as the bulk of his thesis project. It was a product, the program stated, "of some 18 months' work in the U.S. and Europe." The first of these torsos, announced as Concerto Movement for Piano, Violin and Orchestra, K. 315f, was the more substantial of the two and received by far the better performance. To Levin's great credit, there was no noticeable break between the exposition as completed by Mozart and his own continuation based on his knowledge...
LEVIN has similar success with the Quintet Movement for Clarinet and Strings in B flat, K. 516c, where Mozart had left him even more to go on. Its presentation was unfortunately marred by poor intonation and general timidity on the part of the performers, principally the upper strings...
Complaint, however, is bootless and beside the point. To say that the concert was enjoyable would be an understatement--it was stupendous. After all, with Levin's gifts as a pianist and composer and with Mozart as collaborator, how could anyone miss...