The amazing talents of Robert Levin continue to stun and delight audiences globally. Beyond my friend’s surpreme musical gifts, are his powers of musical history interpetation. Levin simply channels Mozart, like nobody else on the planet perhaps.
His exquisite wife Ya Fei is breathtakingly talented as well, and they perform as a husband wife duo. carving out their own highly defined musical niche, much to the world’s delight. At any given time, Robert will call me up to chat, and he is always somewhere exotic. From Finland to Genoa, to Jerusalem to Moscow, you need a team navagational experts to keep up with this towering figure. Robert Levin has a number of incredible Youtube movies that are, in my opinion, highly education and entertaining. Its most rare to find someone who understands the delicate balance needed to appreciate the fragility and hence the beauty of Classical Music. Who is Robert Levin? Well…..
Pianist Robert Levin has been heard throughout the United States, Europe, Australia, and Asia, in recital, as soloist, and in chamber concerts. His solo engagements include the orchestras of Atlanta, Berlin, Birmingham, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Los Angeles, Montreal, Toronto, Utah and Vienna on the Steinway with such conductors as James Conlon, Bernard Haitink, Sir Charles Mackerras, Sir Neville Marriner, Seiji Ozawa, Sir Simon Rattle and Joseph Silverstein. On period pianos he has appeared with the Academy of Ancient Music, the English Baroque Soloists, the Handel & Haydn Society, the London Classical Players, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, with Christopher Hogwood, Sir Charles Mackerras, Nicholas McGegan, Sir Roger Norrington, and Sir John Eliot Gardiner. He has performed frequently at such festivals as Sarasota, Oregon Bach, Tanglewood, Ravinia, Bremen, Lockenhaus, and the Mozartwoche in Salzburg. As a chamber musician he has a long association with violist Kim Kashkashian and appears frequently with his wife, pianist Ya-Fei Chuang, in duo recitals and with orchestra. After more than a quarter century as an artist faculty member at the Sarasota Music Festival he succeeded Paul Wolfe as Artistic Director in 2007.
Robert Levin is renowned for his restoration of the Classical period practice of improvised embellishments and cadenzas; his Mozart and Beethoven performances have been hailed for their active mastery of the Classical musical language. He has made recordings for DG Archiv, CRI, Decca/Oiseau-Lyre, Deutsche Grammophon, ECM, Klavierfestival Ruhr, New York Philomusica, Nonesuch, Philips, and SONY Classical. Among these are the complete Bach concertos with Helmuth Rilling as well as the English Suites and the Well-Tempered Clavier (on five keyboard instruments) for Hänssler’s 172-CD Edition Bach-akademie. Other recordings include a Beethoven concerto cycle with Sir John Eliot Gardiner and the Orchestre Révoluionnaire et Romantique for Archiv, a Mozart concerto cycle with Christopher Hogwood and the Academy of Ancient Music for Decca/Oiseau-Lyre and the first volume of a Mozart sonata cycle for Deutsche Harmonia Mundi. A passionate advocate of new music, Robert Levin has commissioned and premiered a large number of works, including Joshua Fineberg’s Veils (2001), John Harbison’s Second Sonata (2003), Yehudi Wyner’s piano concerto Chiavi in mano (Pulitzer Prize, 2006), Bernard Rands’ Preludes(2007) and Thomas Oboe Lee’s Piano Concerto (2007). His recording of the complete piano music of Henri Dutilleux was released by ECM this year.
Please look at this video below and tell me Robert Levin is not one of the brightest stars in the America’s skies.
Robert Levin studied piano with Louis Martin and composition with Stefan Wolpe in New York. He worked with Nadia Boulanger in Fontainebleau and Paris while still in high school, afterwards attending Harvard. Upon graduation he was invited by Rudolf Serkin to head the theory department of the Curtis Institute of Music, a post he left after five years to take up a professorship at the School of the Arts, SUNY Purchase, outside of New York City. In 1979 he was Resident Director of the Conservatoire américain in Fontainebleau, France, at the request of Nadia Boulanger, and taught there from 1979 to 1983. From 1986 to 1993 he was professor of piano at the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany. President of the International Johann Sebastian Bach Competition and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he is Dwight P. Robinson, Jr. Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University.
In addition to his performing activities, Robert Levin is a noted theorist and Mozart scholar, and is the author of a number of articles and essays on Mozart. A member of the Akademie für Mozartforschung, his completions of Mozart fragments are published by Bärenreiter, Breitkopf & Härtel, Carus, Peters, and Wiener Urtext Edition, and have been recorded and performed throughout the world. Levin’s cadenzas to the Mozart violin concertos have been recorded by Gidon Kremer with Nikolaus Harnoncourt and the Vienna Philharmonic for Deutsche Grammophon and published by Universal-Edition. Henle has issued his cadenzas to the flute, flute and harp, oboe, horn and bassoon concertos and to the Beethoven violin concerto. His reconstruction of the Symphonie concertante in E-flat major for four winds and orchestra, K.297B, was premièred by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra at the Mozartwoche in Salzburg, and has subsequently been performed worldwide. The first of the many recordings of the work, by Philips, won the 1985 Grand Prix International du Disque.
In August 1991 Robert Levin’s completion of the Mozart Requiem was premièred by Helmuth Rilling at the European Music Festival in Stuttgart, Germany, to a standing ovation. His completion of the Mozart Mass in C minor, K. 427, commissioned by Carnegie Hall, was premiered by Rilling in New York in January 2005 and in Europe two months later. Both works have been performed worldwide and are published by Carus-Verlag.