This coming Friday ECM New Series will release the first complete recording of the piano sonatas of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart performed on his own fortepiano. The pianist is Mozart scholar Robert Levin; and, unless I am mistaken, the last time I saw him here in San Francisco was he was a guest soloist for the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra conducted by Nicholas McGegan. As one may expect, this seven-CD album is currently available for pre-ordering from Amazon.com; and, as I write this, the Web page claims that the guaranteed pre-order price include a discount of over 50%.
The CDs are packaged with a 100-page booklet with an extended essay by Ulrich Leisinger about both the sonatas and the instrument. (The booklet length accommodates the essay text in both German and English.) There are also several reproductions of Mozart’s scores and a performers note by Levin. Pre-orders are also being taken for the MP3 download; but, as of this writing, that download does not include the booklet, which is a great disadvantage for the seriously attentive listener.
In addition to the basic canon of eighteen three-movement sonatas, Levin has included four additional tracks. The most familiar of these is the K. 475 fantasia in C minor, which is performed as an “prelude” to the K. 457 sonata, also in C minor. Levin also includes three single-movement offerings, fragments for which he provided the respective completions. These are K. 42 in C major, K. 400 in B-flat major, and K. 312 in G minor.
It goes without saying that these are “historically informed” performances. Indeed, the press release that notified me of this album included a valuable paragraph that reflects on Levin’s approach to execution:
The pianist traces the customs on how to deal with repeats back to Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach, who, in a forward to his Sonatas with Varied Reprises (1759), commented on the practice of repeats extensively, noting, at the time, that “decoration of repeats is in the present day indispensable” and “expected of every executant.” C.P.E. Bach had been a big influence on Mozart, and Levin treats his piano sonatas accordingly, by not only limiting himself to small embellishments in the descant, but applying changes that involve the entire compositional fabric. Thus, the repeats are handled freely, with altered details in the melody, the accompaniment and, as the occasion demands, the harmony, and even with short interpolations (additional material added in-between musical phrases).
Scholarship aside, there is a refreshing rhetoric that Levin brings to every track in this collection. The sonorities of his instrument sparkle in every major key movement, while the responsiveness of the keyboard allows him to seek out just the right shadings for the minor key passages. Sadly, there are still too many pianists out there that dismiss eighteenth-century keyboard instruments as too weak to be convincing. This comes from a misplaced association of limited dynamic range with inadequate expressiveness.
To such skeptics I assert that wide-dynamic range is not a prerequisite for convincing subjectivity. Every track on Levin’s recordings goes straight to the heart of the expressive capacity of each Mozart movement. Levin consistently knows how to make the most of his instrument, rather than worrying about a dynamic range far narrower than that of the latest instrument to roll off the Steinway assembly line.
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