Robert Levin

Meet Other Faculty:

Thai-Son Dang

Ilana Vered

John Perry

Ian Jones

Boris Slutsky

​Jinsang Lee

Yoshikazu Nagai

Ya-Fei Chuang

Mina Hirobe-Perry

Xinning Zhang

Chun-Chieh Yen

Pianist Robert Levin has been heard through­­­­out the United States, Europe, Aus­­tralia, and Asia, in recital, as soloist, and in chamber concerts. His solo engagements include the orchestras of Atlanta, BBC, Berlin, Birmingham, Bos­ton, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, La Scala, Los Angeles, Mon­­­treal, Philadelphia, Toronto, Utah and Vienna on the Stein­­­way with conductors Semyon Bychkov, James Conlon, Bernard Hai­tink, Sir Charles Mac­kerras, Sir Neville Mar­riner, Seiji Ozawa, Sir Simon Rattle, Esa-Pekka Salonen, and Joseph Silverstein. On period pianos he has appeared with the Academy of Ancient Music, La Chambre Phil­harmonique, the English Baroque Soloists, the Handel & Haydn Society, the London Classical Players, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, the Orchestre Révo­lu­tion­naire et Ro­man­tique, and Philharmonia Baroque, with Sir John Eliot Gardiner, Chris­topher Hogwood, Emmanuel Krivine, Sir Charles Mackerras, Nicholas McGe­gan, and Sir Roger Nor­rington.  He has per­formed frequently at such festivals as Sara­sota, Oregon Bach, Tanglewood, Ravinia, Bremen, Locken­haus, and the Mozartwoche in Salzburg. As a chamber musician he has a long association with violist Kim Kashkash­­ian and appears frequently with Steven Isserlis and with his wife, pianist Ya-Fei Chuang, in duo recitals and with orchestra. An artist faculty member at the Sarasota Music Festival since 1979, he was its Artistic Director from 2007 to 2016.
Robert Levin is renowned for his restoration of the Classical period practice of impro­vised embel­lish­ments and caden­zas; his Mozart and Beethoven performan­ces have been hailed for their active mas­tery of the Classical musical language. He has made record­ings for Bridge, DG Archiv, CRI, Decca/Oiseau-Lyre, Deutsche Gram­­mo­phon, ECM, Hyperion, Klavierfestival Ruhr, Le Palais des Dégustateurs, New York Philomusica, Nonesuch, Philips, and SONY Classical. Among these are the complete Bach concertos with Hel­muth Rilling as well as the English Suites and the Well-Tempered Clavier (on five keyboard instru­ments) for Hänssler’s 172-CD Edition Bach­akade­mie. Other recordings include a Beethoven con­certo cycle with Sir John Eliot Gardiner and the Orchestre Révo­lu­tionnaire et Roman­tique for Archiv, a Mozart concerto cycle with Chris­­­to­pher Hogwood and the Acad­emy of An­cient Music for Decca/Oiseau-Lyre, and the complete piano music of Dutilleux for ECM. A passionate advocate of new music, Robert 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’ Preludes(2007), Thomas Oboe Lee’s Piano Concerto (2007) and Hans Peter Türk’s Träume (2012). Recent recordings include Rands’ Preludes, Impromptu, and Espressione IV (with Ursula Oppens) on Bridge, and the complete Beethoven sonatas and variations for fortepiano and ’cello with Steven Isserlis on Hyperion; forthcoming releases include the six Bach Partitas, the complete Schubert trios with Noah Bendix-Balgley and Peter Wiley for Le Palais des Dégustateurs, and the complete Mozart sonatas on Mozart’s Walter piano for ECM.
Robert Levin studied piano with Louis Martin and composition with Stefan Wolpe in New York. He worked with Nadia Boulanger in Fon­tainebleau and Paris from age 12-16. Upon his graduation from Harvard he was invited by Rudolf Serkin to head the theory department of the Curtis Institute of Music, thereafter taking up a professorship at the School of the Arts, SUNY Purchase. In 1979 he was Resident Director of the Conserva­toire américain in Fontainebleau, France, at the request of Nadia Boulanger, and taught there from 1979 to 1983. From 1986 to 1993 he was professor of piano at the Staatliche Hoch­schule für Musik in Freiburg im Breis­gau, Germany.  President of the International Johann Sebastian Bach Competition, a mem­­ber of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he is Dwight P. Robinson, Jr. Research Professor of the Humanities at Harvard Uni­versity and Visiting Professor at The Juilliard School.
In addition to his performing career, 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, Henle, Peters, and Wiener Urtext Edi­­­tion, and have been recorded and performed throughout the world. Levin’s caden­zas to the Mozart violin concertos were recorded by Gidon Kremer with Nikolaus Harnoncourt and the Vienna Philhar­monic for Deutsche Grammophon and published by Universal-Edition. Henle has issued his cadenzas to the Mozart flute, flute and harp, oboe, horn and bassoon concertos; the Beethoven violin concerto; and the viola concertos of Hoffmeister and Stamitz. His recon­struc­tion of the Symphonie concertante in E-flat major for four winds and orchestra, K.297B, was pre­mièred by the Vienna Philhar­mo­­nic Orches­tra at the Mozartwoche in Salzburg, and has been performed worldwide. The first of the many recordings of the work, by Philips, won the 1985 Grand Prix Interna­tional du Disque.
In August 1991 Robert Levin’s completion of the Mozart Requiem was premièred by Hel­muth Rilling at the European Music Festival in Stuttgart, Germany, to a standing ovation. His completion of the Mozart Mass in C minor, K. 427, commissioned by Carnegie Hall, was premiered by Rilling in New York in January 2005 and in Europe two months later. Both works have been performed worldwide and are published by Carus-Verlag.