Mozart: Piano Concertos

Chronique

This is volume 11 of a Mozart piano concerto series instigated in the 1990s by the then-conductor of the Academy of Ancient Music, Christopher Hogwood. The series foundered due to lack of funds but was revived during the COVID-19 pandemic. The massive booklet, well worth the money for physical album buyers, tells the whole story and includes essays on the performers here, the immediate history of these Mozart works, one on the later history of the concerto for multiple instruments, and even one on artist Paul Klee's interest in music (a little tribute to Hogwood), and more. The central figure is pianist Robert Levin, a Mozart specialist whose ways with the composer are nothing if not controversial. Those who have heard Levin before will not be unaware of what they are getting into here. He injects a substantial element of improvisation in the form of ornamentation and genuinely improvised cadenzas, presumably as Mozart would have done. Levin even disregards Mozart's explicit instructions in the Concerto for two pianos in F major, K. 242; he uses just one piano for a continuo part where Mozart specifies both. Listeners must decide for themselves what they think of all this, but no one can accuse Levin of supplying a superfluous new version of Mozart nor of being boring in the least. There is also a new piece, an unfinished Concerto movement for piano, violin, and orchestra, K. Anh. 56, in a completion by Levin. In the F major concerto (played in its rarer reworked two-piano version by Mozart, rather than in the original for three pianos), and in the Piano Concerto No. 10 in E flat major, K. 365, Levin is joined by pianist Ya-Fei Chuang, to whom he is married; violinist Bojan Čičić appears in the unfinished concerto, and the conductor of the Academy of Ancient Music is Laurence Cummings. The music is played on historical instruments at A = 430 Hz, just slightly flatter than modern concert pitch. One looks forward to seeing what innovations are coming in Mozart's later concertos. This album landed on classical best-seller lists in the autumn of 2023.

© James Manheim /TiVo