Do Je-hae edits news stories as part of the AI team.
Pianist Levin reinvents ’old music’
By Do Je-hae
By Do Je-hae
Fingers, heart and brains — these are the three things that a musician needs, legendary pianist Arthur Rubinstein once said.
An example of this ideal combination would be the American pianist and musicologist Robert Levin, who is in Seoul this week for a series of concerts and a meeting with fans.
After delivering a rare all-Bach program Monday at the Hoam Art Hall in Seoul, the 64-year-old presented a work never performed in Korea before — an unfinished solo work for piano by Mozart.
Mozart at one time had been fascinated by the Baroque masters before him and realized he should write more music in their style. He embarked on creating a suite for piano in four movements — allemande, courante, sarabande and gigue — in accordance with the style of George Frideric
Handel, the German-British Baroque composer.
But Mozart never finished the last two movements, leaving nothing but a few first bars. Levin completed the last two movements, and he played the entire four movements Wednesday during a meeting with fans at an arts museum in central Seoul. The piece had never been performed in Korea.
A renowned specialist in early piano music and various keyboard instruments, Levin is also a composer, improvising cadenzas or writing new music as well as reconstructing or embellishing the music of masters like Mozart, Bach and Beethoven.
His version of Mozart’s “Requiem” was premiered in 1991 in Stuttgart at the European Music Festival. His most famous Mozart essay was the 1998 “Who Wrote the Mozart Four-Wind Concertante?”
Knowledge of music
During his third visit to Korea, the professor of music who teaches Classical and Baroque periods at Harvard University seemed eager to share his knowledge of and passion for music with the audience.
“It’s not enough just to play beautifully,” Levin said after performing the Mozart-Levin suite on a lovely Steinway to a small but enthusiastic audience.
The key message during his meeting with the fans was that performers are storytellers, and so “we must know to have the right to speak (perform).”
The meeting was joined by young American violinist Stephan Pi Jackiw, who once took Levin’s chamber music classes at Harvard. Both musicians stressed the importance of knowledge of the music and the composers and also of the rite of passage for a true musician.
“We try to be as expressive as we can, and expression comes from knowledge,” Levin added.
“Music doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Composers were influenced by what was happening in the world. So it’s important to know what was going on in the composer’s life,” Jackiw said.
While Levin has been reinventing old music, he is also a champion of new music. He has been an advocate for modern composers such as John Harbison, who wrote the music for the opera “The Great Gatsby” commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera in New York.
Levin is one of the world’s most respected keyboard players in the early instruments movement, equally at home with the harpsichord, the fortepiano, and the modern piano. His early-piano projects include recordings on the harpsichord and the organ.
The pianist studied at Harvard University. He taught at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia before becoming a professor at Harvard University in 1993.
He completed his visit to Seoul with a moving performance of Mozart-Beethoven sonatas at the Hoam Art Center Wednesday.
This is his first visit to Korea since 2008.