This, the fourth CD in the Levin-Hogwood series of the Mozart piano concertos (previous issues have been reviewed in 7/94, 9/95 and 11/96), shows the partnership gaining in strength and assurance. The performance of the D minor Concerto, the latest and largest they have tackled so far, is a major achievement, one of those recordings that has about it a sense of occasion, a feeling that the artists are creating the music afresh. Well, so they are, to a rather greater extent than usual: Robert Levin improvises the cadenzas and quite a lot else besides. The first-movement cadenza here is a particular triumph, beginning with thematic matter from the movement and other allusive material, but working it in a quite original yet wholly Mozartian way, then devolving into bravura, again wholly Mozartian in its harmonic handling and its pianistic character. It is quite thrilling that a player can do this today with such a masterly command of the style. I hope it isn’t lese-majeste to say that I can hardly believe Mozart himself always did it better.
Hogwood and Levin take quite a measured tempo for this movement, and it works very well, giving Levin just the space he needs to shape the music pointedly and with meaning. Here and there he does vary the text more than one might expect. Of course, that is well within his rights, historically speaking, and he never transgresses the boundaries of good taste. But here and there I find myself wishing he hadn’t, at least quite so much. An anticipation, an ornament added, a link between phrases, a decoration of the first of a group of similar phrases (so one is on tenterhooks, wondering what next, if anything); these somehow seem, in a work of this scale and individuality, not beyond question. In the Romance, there are one or two moments where the elaboration of the main theme seems restless, though others, for example the final statement, with a witty touch (bar 133) anticipating Mozart’s own variation in the orchestra, are entirely persuasive. Yet elsewhere on this CD, Levin sometimes ornaments a phrase in such a way that the discourse between solo and orchestra is subverted: the dialogues and echoes don’t quite work.
In the lighter G major Concerto Levin is truly on sparkling form, playing the outer movements gracefully and wittily – the finale is especially fine, with the basic speed maintained (it is usually considerably slackened for the middle variations), to brilliant effect. There is some attractive varying of repeats, which is surely what the music asks for (but rarely gets). There is elaboration here too, occasional in the first movement (I was disconcerted by the linking phrase in the secondary theme, which seems to me to be characterized by its silences: and that’s how the orchestra has it), more generous in the Andante. Is it just habituation to the standard text that makes me faintly doubtful about this? Should Mozart’s own line, so rich and elaborate already, be regarded as his intended last word? Everything Levin does is intensely musical, and unfailingly Mozartian, and the main climax of the movement is handled quite finely and with great power: but (for example) is it appropriate to insert a phrase at that remarkable moment where the woodwind pause on a D major chord and the piano resumes on a D minor one? This seems to me a calculatedly stark effect on Mozart’s part. Mozart’s famous remark in a letter, telling his family that they were correct to think that something was missing in the slow movement text of K451, does after all imply that generally nothing was missing: i.e. the text was at least in some degree definitive.
Well, these are complex issues. The central one, however, is that these are very fine performances, with much sensitive and delicate playing from Levin, with admirable support from Hogwood and the AAM musicians; and the balance between piano and orchestra seems particularly happily managed with the glittering fortepiano sound coming clearly through the textures but so translucent as to allow the woodwind details to be heard very sharply too.'