Meet the man who says improvisation is the key to Mozart

In August 1993, the pianist Robert Levin sat down in Walthamstow Assembly Rooms with the conductor Christopher Hogwood and the Academy of Ancient Music (AAM) to record the complete piano concertos of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Mozart was big – the bicentenary celebrations of 1991 had made a global impact. And Hogwood and the AAM were big too. After their groundbreaking period-instrument Mozart symphony cycle a decade earlier, the 27 piano concertos seemed like a wholly achievable ambition. What could go wrong?

Only, as it turned out, the entire classical record industry. The project was meant to take a decade but in 2000 the record label, Decca, lost its nerve and pulled the plug. Hogwood died in 2014 with the cycle still unfinished. And yet two decades, a global pandemic and two changes of music director later, Levin and the Academy are about to bring it to completion. Since 2021, they’ve recorded four more albums on the orchestra’s own label. When the fifth is released next month, Levin and the AAM will have completed the most comprehensive survey of Mozart’s music for piano and orchestra ever recorded on period instruments – extending far beyond the 27 numbered concertos. Levin still can’t quite believe it.

‘We got eight discs done before Decca decided to can the whole thing,’ he says. ‘It was heartbreaking, and neither Chris [Hogwood] nor I ever gave up on the possibility that it might be resuscitated through some miracle. Chris departed for a better world, and nothing much was happening. And then, after 20 years, to my absolute amazement, the Academy decided to bring it to fruition.’ The final disc includes Mozart’s 25th and 27th concertos, as well as the concert aria ‘Ch’io mi scordi di te?’ (sung by hot-ticket soprano Louise Alder), and its release next month will coincide with the climax of the AAM’s 50th anniversary season.