Levin Plays an Engaging Mozart Program

Articulate, conversational and spontaneous, Robert Levin’s performing style--as natural and unforced in a mammoth outdoor amphitheater as it must be in a lecture room, his more accustomed venue--fits the recital format comfortably. It certainly fit the Hollywood Bowl, where the American pianist-Mozart scholar appeared Wednesday, returning to our preeminent musical showplace exactly 12 months after his debut there.

A Mozart piano recital in the great outdoors? Don’t laugh--an enthusiastic audience seemed to hear every note, which included both the composer’s very first and very last pieces in the genre, as well as an amusing demonstration of Levin’s Mozart-style improvising skills and two of the composer’s major sonatas.

Credit expert sound-dispersal and unobtrusive amplification; one caught not only all the music but all the pianist’s words as well.

The spoken notes were informative but not distracting, the scores themselves, though played loosely rather than sculpturally, providing the focus of interest. Levin makes a tour of each piece of music, guiding the listener through its progress, climax and conclusion as a good storyteller lets his tale unfold. Even those who might wish for less talking and more note-striking in a recital of this material had to be charmed by Levin’s self-deprecating remarks.

For some, the high point of this generous evening may have been the 12-minute improvisation on themes submitted by members of the audience, so effortlessly did the one-time-only composition come into being and so virtuously did the pianist play it.

For others, the sonatas, the one in F, K. 533, and the one in B-flat, K. 333, provided the peak experience, for clarity, ease of technique and narrative thrust. Levin’s use of modulating passages--some of them actually written by Mozart, for use by his sister, Nannerl--between works was also engaging, retaining a sense of continuity in the proceedings.