MUSIC

Pianist Robert Levin is an old friend of the Token Creek Chamber Music Festival, held annually at the refurbished DeForest barn of John and Rose Mary Harbison. As he did last year, Levin opened this 2009 festival with an all-Mozart program on Saturday, August 29 (to be repeated Sunday afternoon).

Two of the program's three pieces were piano concertos, among the few that Mozart composed for full orchestra yet also contrived so that the wind and other parts could be dispensed with, leaving only strings -- indeed, no more than a string quintet (including double bass) -- meant for chamber-music intimacy. The amiable Concerto No. 11 (in the conventional reckoning) in F major was balanced by the more extroverted Concerto No. 13 in C, even as shorn of its trumpets and timpani.

Levin is noted as a champion of the fortepiano, the forerunner of the modern grand, and the instrument with which Mozart himself would have been familiar. For this concert, however, he used a big Steinway and had no hesitation in bringing out bold sonorities with it. As a Mozart specialist, though, he had a scholarly command of the style, and as an expert improviser he added embellishments here and there while extemporizing his own cadenzas -- the long one at the end of the No. 13's first movement surprised even himself!

As a performer, meanwhile, Levin is notable for energy and exuberance. His five colleagues seemed to be having a fun working with him, but no one appeared to take more pleasure in the performance than he himself.

Sandwiched between the two Concertos was a Sonata for Violin and Piano in B-flat (K. 454), a generous three-movement work that Mozart wrote for himself to perform with a young celebrity Italian violinist who was visiting Vienna in 1784, one Regina Strinasacchi, a graduate of Venice's Ospedale della Pietà (where Vivaldi once served). Mozart himself praised her playing for its "taste and feeling", which he clearly put to the test in this work. He had not yet given up the old rationale that identified such works as being intended "for piano with violin accompaniment," and so the piano part (for himself) is highly prominent. But he gave the violin a role of full partnership, yet rich in contrasting opportunities for expressiveness.

Co-director of the festival, Rose Mary Harbison, met such challenges handsomely, while Levin demonstrated his immersion in Mozart's mentality by playing from a facsimile of the composer's own manuscript, crabbed handwriting and all.

The festival continues through Sunday, September 6, including a piano recital by Russell Sherman and programs of both jazz and further chamber works, with special attention to the art, inspiration, and associations of Sun Prairie native Georgia O'Keeffe.