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Mozart@253

Toronto Symphony Orchestra

Robert Levin, piano

Peter Oundjian, conductor

Roy Thomson Hall, Toronto

On Saturday

The ebullient and fearless Mozart scholar and pianist Robert Levin landed with a splash on Mozart's D-minor Concerto, K.466, Saturday night at Roy Thomson Hall, aided and abetted by conductor Peter Oundjian and a classically slimmed Toronto Symphony Orchestra.

Levin certainly left his mark on this famous piece – one of only two minor-key concertos in the great Mozart canon of 27, and the one chosen most often for their own performance vehicles by two great 19th-century composer-pianists: Beethoven and Mendelssohn. (Both men, indeed, composed their own cadenzas for it.)

Levin used the work largely, if not entirely, to demonstrate his courage and facility as an improviser, strumming with the tuttis as if the orchestra couldn't quite manage without his help, tirelessly embellishing his solo part, and plunging into his own spontaneous cadenzas with the clamorous unfettered brio of a brainy kid just out of school.

The improvisatory features of Levin's performance did intervene between this listener and Mozart's music. But what gave the performance such conviction was Levin's vigorous sense of the musical and dramatic structure of the work that underlay his shenanigans: the urgent, ominous, sardonic opening movement; the lyrical idyll of the Romanza, interrupted by another spell of turbulence; and the Vesuvian rondo-finale, with its escalation of the dark unrest of the first movement, alleviated only at the eleventh hour by a coda in the major key. This is not namby-pamby music, and Levin's concept, apart from his extraneous self-indulgences (including his mugging of astonishment at the beginning of the coda) showed him fully aware of its essential power.

He did give us a kind of fair warning of his improvisatory intentions before he played the concerto. First, he reminded us that Mozart always improvised his own cadenzas. Then, Levin sat at the piano and, for some endless minutes, improvised a kind of four-movement fantasia purportedly “in the style of Mozart”, based on four written-out themes plucked by conductor Oundjian from a basketful submitted by members of the audience during intermission. There was a great deal of scampering about the keys, rudimentary modulating and reckless banging in octaves, not really adding up to anything like any Mozart I've ever heard, but plucky, industrious and fluent, and the audience roared its approval. I personally found it coarse and overweening and wondered if it would ever end. While I would have loved to hear Mozart (or Art Tatum) improvise, I didn't much like this. I'm not a born sympathizer with the genre; I'm inclined to agree with Stravinsky, who grumbled “improvisation is the slagheap of art.”

Before Levin's performances – which really did assume pride of place in the concert – we heard a mailed-in account of the Overture to Mozart's mature opera Cosi fan tutte, and an attractive, handy reading of the Sinfonia concertante in E flat, K. 297b, a work which may or may not be by Mozart. The beauties of some of its themes suggest it is, but details of their handling have given rise to scholarly doubts, and the score has never been definitively authenticated. Nevertheless, on this occasion, the TSO and four of its principal winds – oboist Sarah Jeffrey, clarinetist Joaquin Valdepenas, bassoonist Michael Sweeney and French-hornist Neil Deland – gave a persuasive account of it.

Special to The Globe and Mail