Background
Levin, Robert David was born on October 13, 1947 in Brooklyn. Son of Gerald Harold and Beatrice Ann (Spieler) Levin.
Levin, Robert David was born on October 13, 1947 in Brooklyn. Son of Gerald Harold and Beatrice Ann (Spieler) Levin.
Levin attended the Brooklyn Friends School and Andrew Jackson High School, and spent his junior year studying music with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. He attended Harvard, where he earned his Bachelor of Arts magna cum laude in 1968 with a thesis entitled The Unfinished Works of West. A. Mozart.
Levin took private lessons at Chatham Square Music School, Conservatoire National de Musique and the Fontainebleau School of Music in:
piano, with January Gorbaty, Louis Martin, Alice Gaultier-Léon, Jean Casadesus, Clifford Curzon and Robert Casadesus
organ, with Nadia Boulanger
solfège, with Seymour Bernstein, Louis Martin and Annette Dieudonné
counterpoint, with Suzanne Bloch and Nadia Boulanger
composition, with Stefan Wolpe
conducting, with Eleazar de Carvalho.
Foreign the Norwegian pianist, see Robert Levin (Norwegian pianist). Robert Doctorate. Levin (born 13 October 1947) is a classical performer, musicologist and composer, and is the artistic director of the Sarasota Music Festival. After graduating from Harvard, Levin was named head of the theory department at the Curtis Institute of Music.
He was subsequently appointed associate professor of music and coordinator of theory instruction at the State University of New York Purchase, and full professor in 1975.
From 1986 to 1993, he served as professor of piano at the Hochschule für Musik Freiburg in Germany. In 1993 he became professor of music at his alma mater, Harvard University, and still is.
In 2012, as Humanitas Visiting Professor of chamber music at Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities, University of Cambridge, he gave two lectures entitled Improvising and Composing Mozart and a concert with Academy of Ancient Music. Levin"s academic career has included teaching and tutoring performance practice (especially involving keyboard instruments and conducting, with an emphasis on the Classical period) in addition to music history and theory.
Levin has completed or reconstructed a number of eighteenth-century works, especially unfinished compositions by Mozart and Johann Sebastian Bach.
In the Mozart Requiem, he reconstructed an Amen fugue from Mozart"s own sketches. John Eliot Gardiner commissioned him to write missing orchestral parts to five movements of cantatas by Johann Sebastian Bach, such as Ach! ich sehe, itzt, da ich zur Hochzeit gehe, BWV 162. As a performer, he is best known as soloist in Classical-era piano concertos in general, and those of Mozart and Beethoven in particular, in which he robustly re-creates performance practice of the composers" time such as by improvising cadenzas and shorter embellishments in the composers" style.
Levin has also composed several works, including the following: Two clarinet sonatas (1961.
1967-1968) Two Short Piano Pieces (1966-1967) Bassoon Sonata (1965-1966) Woodwind Quintet (1965) Piano Quartet (1964-1965) Piano Sonata (1962).
Member GEMA, International Stiftung Mozarteum, New Bach Society.
Married Christine Noël Whittlesey, May 18, 1974 (divorced 1992).