Harvard academic and pianist Robert Levin approaches Mozart with a combination of infinite sensitivity and wild derring-do. His collaboration with Charles Mackerras, in the latter's welcome return to the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra after many years, was a rewarding meeting of interpretative flair and scholarly minds.
Levin is known for championing the lost art of improvising cadenzas in 18th- and early 19th-century concertos. At Symphony Hall, he allowed himself a surprising amount of artistic licence in Mozart's Piano Concerto K491. It is not uncommon for pianists to vary thematic material when it reappears; Levin ornamented and embroidered freely throughout. He even had the audacity to elaborate the immaculately conceived double theme and variations of the finale.
It made for a very different experience - yet one that, in Levin's masterly hands (albeit here on a concert grand and not his preferred fortepiano), was thoroughly convincing. And while the CBSO does not use period instruments, such was the spontaneity of its playing under Mackerras's direction that it gave an uncanny sense of what it might have been like to hear Mozart's own performances.
When it came to the end of the Requiem in D minor, Levin was faced with a more complex problem: the interpolations of an earlier composer who had also gilded Mozart's lily. Franz Xaver Süssmayr finished the Requiem at the request of Mozart's widow Constanze just after the composer's death. Levin chose to respect the weight of 200 years of tradition, retaining what is based on the Mozartean framework but eliminating Süssmayr's errors and anomalies. He created a more balanced structure, in keeping with Mozart's own church music and the theatricality of Handelian precedents he so admired.
The CBSO chorus rose nobly to these new demands, while Susan Gritton, Catherine Wyn-Rogers, Timothy Robinson and David Wilson-Johnson formed a solo quartet both expressive and dramatic. Thanks primarily to Mackerras - who had attuned the ear to the dark colouring of Mozart's instrumentation with the opening work, the Symphony No 32 in G K318 - this was a performance of compassion, as well as fire and brimstone. It had an intrinsic vitality: a potent reminder that a requiem celebrates the quick and the dead.
