Robert Levin, piano, has been heard throughout the United States, Europe, Australia, and Asia. His solo engagements include the orchestras of Atlanta, Berlin, Birmingham, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Los Angeles, Montreal, Utah, and Vienna on the Steinway with such conductors as James Conlon, Bernard Haitink, Sir Neville Marriner, Seiji Ozawa, Sir Simon Rattle, and Joseph Silverstein. On period pianos he has appeared with the Academy of Ancient Music, English Baroque Soloists, Handel and Haydn Society, London Classical Players, Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, and Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, with Sir John Eliot Gardiner, Christopher Hogwood, Sir Charles Mackerras, Nicholas McGegan, and Sir Roger Norrington. Renowned for his improvised embellishments and cadenzas in Classical period repertoire, Robert Levin has made recordings for DG Archiv, CRI, Decca/London, Deutsche Grammophon Yellow Label, ECM, New York Philomusica, Nonesuch, Philips, and Sony Classical. These include a Mozart concerto cycle for Decca/London with Christopher Hogwood and the Academy of Ancient Music; a Beethoven concerto cycle for DG Archiv with John Eliot Gardiner and the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique (including the world premiere recording of Beethoven’s arrangement of the Fourth Concerto for piano and string quintet together with his arrangement of the Second Symphony for piano trio); and the complete Bach harpsichord concertos with Helmuth Rilling as well as the six English Suites (on piano) and both books of the Well-Tempered Clavier (on five keyboard instruments) as part of Hänssler’s 172-CD Edition Bachakademie. The first recording of a Mozart piano sonata cycle was released by Deutsche Harmonia Mundi last year. A passionate advocate of new music, Mr. Levin has commissioned and premiered a large number of works, including Joshua Fineberg’s Veils (2001), John Harbison’s Second Sonata (2003), Yehudi Wyner’s piano concerto Chiavi in mano (Pulitzer Prize, 2006), Bernard Rands’s Preludes (2007) and Thomas Oboe Lee’s Piano Concerto ... Mozartiana (2007).
Robert Levin’s active career as a chamber musician includes a long association with the violist Kim Kashkashian. He appears frequently with his wife, pianist Ya-Fei Chuang, in duo recitals and with orchestra. After more than a quarter century as an artist faculty member at the Sarasota Music Festival, he succeeded Paul Wolfe as artistic director in 2007.
In addition to his performing activities, Robert Levin is a noted theorist and Mozart scholar and is the author of a number of articles and essays on Mozart. A member of the Akademie für Mozartforschung, his completions of Mozart fragments are published by Bärenreiter, Breitkopf & Härtel, Carus, Peters, and Wiener Urtext Edition, and recorded and performed throughout the world. His completion of the Mozart C-minor mass, commissioned by Carnegie Hall, was premiered there in January 2005 and has since been recorded and widely performed. Robert Levin is president of the International Johann Sebastian Bach Competition (Leipzig, Germany), a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Dwight P. Robinson, Jr. Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University.