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The Mozart specialist has been honoured with the highest award of the Mozarteum Foundation
Robert Levin – known the world over as a pianist, teacher and composer, as emeritus professor at Harvard University, as a member of the Academy for Mozart Research and as someone who regularly organizes competitions and who for many years was artistic director of the Sarasota Music Festival – was awarded the Golden Mozart Medal on April18, 2024. This is the highest honour that the International Mozarteum Foundation can confer on anyone in the name of Mozart.
In the words of the Foundation’s president, Johannes Honsig-Erlenburg, “Robert Levin has been closely associated with the Mozarteum Foundation for fifty years and we value him as a true friend and benefactor. He is also an exceptional artist who is second to none as a living force in the world of Mozart performances and of Mozart research. He also has a gift for communicating the fascination of Mozart in all its facets to audiences all over the globe. We offer him our heartiest congratulations.”
The American pianist Robert Levin gives concerts and recitals all over the world, appearing with the most distinguished orchestras and conductors. His name is associated first and foremost with reviving the practice of improvising cadenzas and ornaments in Viennese Classical works. But he is also active as an impassioned champion of new music and has given the world premieres of many new pieces. As a chamber recitalist he works regularly with the viola player Kim Kashkashian, the violoncellist Stephen Isserlis and the pianist Ya-Fei Chuang, who is also his wife. In addition to his work in the concert hall he is also active as a musicologist, a scholar and a member of the Academy for Mozart Research at the International Mozarteum Foundation. He has appeared regularly at the Mozart Week Festival since 1984. His editions of Mozart’s unfinished works, which he himself has completed, have been published by every major publishing house as well as being recorded and performed all over the world. Among these works are such monumental compositions as the Requiem K 626 and the Mass in C minor K 427. From 1993 to 2013 Robert Levin was Dwight P. Robinson Junior Professor of Music at Harvard University. He has also been visiting professor at the Juilliard School of Music in New York and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as well as an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His complete recording of Mozart’s keyboard sonatas appeared on the ECM label in September 2022. The instrument used was Mozart’s own Walter fortepiano in the possession of the Mozarteum Foundation.
Since 1914 the Golden Mozart Medal has been awarded to distinguished individuals and institutions that have made an important contribution to our understanding of the life and works of Wolfgang Amadé Mozart and to the work of the International Mozarteum Foundation. Past recipients have included Lilli Lehmann, Karl Böhm, the Vienna Philharmonic, Sir András Schiff, Alfred Brendel, Miloš Forman, Mitsuko Uchida, Nikolaus Harnoncourt and the Salzburg Mozarteum Orchestra. The two most recent recipients were Marc Minkowski, the former artistic director of the Mozart Week Festival, in 2017, and the Cappella Andrea Barca in 2019.
