Expect the unexpected from pianist Levin
Mozart program is sure to include spur-of-the-moment ornamentation
May 24, 2002: The American pianist Robert Levin was in town, playing Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23 in A Major K. 488 with Les Violons du Roy and improvising an elaborate fantasy in strictly classical dialect on a submitted theme.
Levin will apply himself again to K. 488 on Saturday with the same ensemble, and once again extemporize on a submitted theme in a Mozartian manner. Also on the program are Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 24 in C Minor K. 491, Overture to The Marriage of Figaro and Symphony No. 38 (Prague).
Bernard Labadie is still on a health-related leave, so Levin will conduct. Why not? This former head of the music theory department at Harvard does many things.
His completion of Mozart’s Requiem has caught on internationally, and is indeed the version of the masterpiece with which Labadie makes his return to the Violons podium in Quebec City on Feb. 10. There is a repeat the following day and a Montreal performance on Feb. 12 in the Maison symphonique.
(Mozart’s Mass in C Minor is also on this all-choral program. The Violons website is silent on whether this will be given in the Levin completion. Since I gave it a jolly good pan when the St. Lawrence Choir performed it in 2012 — “a preachy and lugubrious Crucifixus that Mozart would never have contemplated” — I am not asking any questions.)
For all his interest in reconstructive surgery, Levin is best known as a period practitioner, although he is willing to play on a modern Steinway, as he does on Saturday. Whatever the instrument, we are sure to hear plenty of spur-of-the-moment ornaments, in accordance with the practice of Mozart’s time, or at least modern notions of what that practice was.
Levin remains firmly devoted to spontaneity. “The basic view is relatively unchanged,” he writes in an email, “but some of what I do has become more audacious with expanding evidence that idiomatic performances in the 18th and early 19th century were more creative than generally acknowledged.”
Not that the pianist showed any inhibition in 1990 when he appeared with the OSM and the conductor Roger Norrington (chief among the period-practice gadflies of the time) in a performance of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3 that was like none other heard in Montreal before or since.
“The stage was a circus of historical trappings,” your intrigued if uneasy correspondent wrote. “The Place des Arts Steinway was stripped of its hood and parked in the middle of the orchestra with the keyboard facing the rear. This created a highly believable approximation of the faint ‘fortepiano’ sound we are told Beethoven heard, or at least imagined.”
As for the playing, it came with “cadenzas improvised, decorations jazzily altered, whole bars recomposed in the virtuoso flourishes of the finale.” Norrington completed this landmark evening with a lean account of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Never had the OSM sounded less like itself.
Les Violons, of course, sound historically informed day in and day out, even if they use modern instruments rather than reconstructions.
Labadie is listed on the website as founding conductor and Mathieu Lussier as associate conductor. Anthony Marwood has been engaged this season as “principal artistic partner.” This British violinist will perform in and conduct a Beethoven program on Nov. 6.
As for Labadie, who suspended artistic activities in June 2014, he is scheduled to return to action on Dec. 3 — not in Quebec City or Montreal, but in St. Louis, where he leads the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra through the first of four performances of Handel’s Messiah. Five performances of the oratorio follow in Chicago with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
There has been no official information about Labadie’s recovery.
“The Messiah performances have been scheduled and not cancelled,” said one source relatively close to the conductor. “Therefore we assume he is doing very well.”
As many of us know, a conductor with links to Montreal was in the pit for a high-profile debut at an international opera house not long ago. His name: Kent Nagano.
After launching the OSM schedule in the second week of September with Pelléas et Mélisande, the American conductor repaired to Germany, where he is beginning his tenure as general music director of the Hamburg State Opera.
His opening statement could not have been more momentous: a new production of Berlioz’s mammoth opera Les Troyens, albeit in a trimmed-down version by the French composer Pascal Dusapin.
Trimmed down and wretchedly staged, to judge by the reviews. “Blood, blood, blood,” is how Manuel Brug of Die Welt opens his appreciation of the Sept. 19
première. Megalitres of the stuff. But precious little else to lend meaning or relevance to the show.
“No Trojan horse, no pyres for Dido, but also no convincing substitute symbols,” Brug laments. And imagine the uproar, he adds, if one of Wagner’s scores had been so severely shortened. Don’t blame Nagano, he writes. Not that the critic lavishes much praise on the conductor, who evidently kept things quick and clear.
Joachim Mischke in the Hamburger Abendblatt is likewise dismissive of the staging by Michael Thalheimer but positive about the orchestra, which he claims he could hardly recognize. Nice cast. And what a response from the public. “Big applause for everybody,” he reports, “roaring for Nagano.”
Elisabeth Richter, writing on the website of the NDR (North German Radio), is cool to the one-trick set with no references to the classical world and the static nature of the direction.
Nevertheless, the première was rewarding because of “the musical quality of the performance.” Nagano evoked a “transparent, round, differentiated orchestral sound” and his collaboration with the singers
was “tremendously sensitive.” Balance has been a problem in recent years in Hamburg, but this soundscape was “carefully considered.”
Your last chance to experience Les Troyens with many buckets of blood and carefully considered sounds in the pit is on Oct. 14. The following week, Nagano is back in Montreal for a program of Strauss, Stravinsky and Ravel.