Program Notes:
Robert Levin’s Mozart

Featuring internationally renowned Mozart scholar and pianist Robert Levin

Steven Lipsitt, Music Director, conducting


Friday, September 28, 2007 at 8 pm
Sunday, September 30, 2007 at 3 pm

• Tchaikovsky
  
• Thomas Oboe Lee
  
• Mozart

Composer Thomas Oboe Lee offers the following program note for his Piano Concerto (Mozartiana), completed July 19, 2007 in Cambridge:

It is with great pleasure that I have had this opportunity to write my very first piano concerto for my next-door neighbor and friend, Robert Levin.

The virtuoso pianist Robert Levin and the music of Mozart are an inseparable pairing. I knew immediately that I had to include some Mozart in this stew. For my Mozartiana I went to the complete Mozart edition and looked for some incomplete melodic or thematic fragments that I could ‘steal’ as themes and motives for my concerto. The concerto is in four sections --- slow-fast, slow-fast. Perhaps I should say that the work is in two movements: in each movement the music begins slowly, then shifts gears and becomes fast. Out of the four themes in this work, three of them are based on Mozart fragments.

The first movement begins with a slow theme in D minor. The material is derivative of a Mozart fragment in D major --- a Kyrie theme for chorus and orchestra. At 80 measures the orchestra goes into a fast romp. The material for this section has nothing to do with Mozart. Texturally, it sounds like a four-part counterpoint display in the style of Bach.

The second movement theme is taken from a Mozart fragment originally intended for an orchestral overture. Its main characteristic is a melodic turn followed by a ‘zig-zagging’ arpeggio theme. The fast music that follows, a mad scherzo (once again at measure 80), is based on a Mozart fragment in triple meter that he sketched for an unfinished string quintet.

When I showed Robert Levin the score, he said he was quite surprised that he did not recognize the Mozart fragments. "When I read through the score," he told me, "it sounded like your characteristic TOL music." Well, I have to say I was quite relieved and pleased. It is okay to ‘steal’ from the Salzburg Genius, but it is more important that the stolen material should go through a filtering process resulting in something that is recognizably my music and not Mozart's.

Incidentally, Mr. Levin is well-known for his improvised cadenzas in concertos by Mozart and Beethoven. Toward the end of the second movement, I gave him ample room to improvise to his heart's content.

--- T.O.L.

Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 25 in C major (K. 503) is the last in a group of twelve ‘grand’ or ‘great’ piano concertos that Mozart wrote for his own use in Vienna. They were all composed between 1784 and 1786 in a remarkable burst of creative inspiration and led to triumphs for Mozart as both composer and piano virtuoso. He would write only two more piano concertos after these, one in 1788 (K. 537) and another entered into his handwritten catalogue of works two weeks before his death in January 1791 (K. 595). After K. 503 he would turn his attention primarily to symphonies and operas.

In extolling the virtues of the concerto form, musical essayist Donald Francis Tovey writes: "Nothing in human life and history is much more thrilling or of more ancient and universal experience than the antithesis of the individual and the crowd; an antithesis which is familiar in every degree, from flat opposition to harmonious reconciliation, and with every contrast and blending of emotion, and which has been of no less universal prominence in works of art than in life. Now the concerto forms express this antithesis with all possible force and delicacy."

The first movement of K. 503, marked Allegro maestoso, is a substantial and complex musical structure that vibrantly combines the qualities of force and delicacy that Tovey identifies. The imposing orchestral ritornello opens with descending fanfares, which introduce the principal thematic material of the exposition (almost always involving three eighth-note upbeats to a stressed downbeat). There is a turn to C minor that can be heard as a foreshadowing of the soloist's later rendering of the second theme in E-flat major. In the development section, this second theme is treated expansively, culminating in a marvelous passage of eight-part polyphony. After the soloist's cadenza, the movement is concluded not with the broad fanfares of the opening, but with an energized version of the three-eighth-note material.

The second movement is a lyrical Andante, in conventional sonata form, with two clear themes skillfully scored for woodwinds, strings, and piano. The pianist and scholar Charles Rosen has described the flow of this movement as "a beautiful combination of simplicity and lavish decoration (with a great variety and contrast of rhythms)."

The Allegretto finale, also in sonata-rondo form, balances the first movement in terms of length, but is notable for a quality of restraint in its expression. There is a frequent alternation of duple- and triple-meter rhythm in the figuration, in both piano and orchestra. Of this finale, Rosen has written: "It is conventional, highly so, but in no pejorative sense: it is merely the basic material of late-eighteenth-century tonality, the bedrock of the style."

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