Hidden gem? This magical Mozart was a true treasure

AROBERT LEVIN (Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh) Masterful Mozart ★★★★★

T every Edinburgh International Festival there is always some hidden gem to be found somewhere. Something you had almost missed initially, perhaps. Or maybe a performance that turned out to be so much better than you expected.

Naturally enough, you never know quite where it’s going to turn up – but the one thing of which you can be assured is that it will.

This year, my hidden gem surfaced at the Queen’s Hall, which – as I may have said before – is just about the best venue at the entire festival for top-quality and sometimes unusually interesting classical music.

Not, I suppose, that Mozart can really be thought of as ‘unusually’ interesting – or reproached over the ‘topness’ of his quality.

This recital by American Mozart specialist Robert Levin, however, surpassed the already high expectations of most of the audience, I believe. I was certainly blown away by sheer magnificence, vitality and obvious joy of his playing.

That playing, too, was on a period instrument, a fortepiano – although the one he actually played was a reproduction, made by Paul McNulty in 2009; albeit after an 1805 instrument by Viennese craftsman Anton Walter.

THE real meat of the programme came with Levin’s spellbinding treatment of some of Mozart’s greatest and richest sonatas – his grace and lyricism came with a flamboyant bravura flourish that, paradoxically, presented familiar pieces anew, but in an authentically late 18th century fashion.

Levin’s presentation of four sets of four Mozart preludes may have been almost dismissed by some as little more than a confection.

But such ‘connecting’ pieces of music were apparently rather more highly regarded in the composer’s own time than they necessarily are today. The sheer verve and impetuosity required of such works literally played into the hands of the masterful Mozart.

Levin’s opening piece was completed by himself after a fragment of Mozart’s work found in a 1767 manuscript.

His encore – which, as he told the audience, took almost as long to explain as to play – was also completed by himself from a truncated piece of music that can be seen in an early portrait of the young Mozart.

Normally, I am somewhat ambivalent, to say the least, about such a practice.

But Robert Levin is a true Mozart scholar and such a fine keyboard player that I was more than willing to suspend my mistrust on this occasion.

Overall, this was a fabulous recital, a very fitting tribute to the maestro – and this year’s Edinburgh International Festival’s hidden gem.