A Night with Sir John Eliot Gardiner

“It’s comforting to think that even [Mozart] has mortal fallibility,” pianist and Harvard professor emeritus Robert Levin said at an open rehearsal in Sanders Theatre on Sunday. Conducted with the members of the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra and focused on the composer’s Piano Concerto No. 24 in C minor, the performance was one in a series of events at Harvard with conductor Sir John Eliot Gardiner, the music department’s inaugural Christoph Wolff Distinguished Visiting Scholar for the year.

Gardiner is an acclaimed conductor who has appeared as a guest conductor for some of the world’s most prominent orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic, the London Symphony Orchestra, and the Vienna Philharmonic. His visit as the Christoph Wolff Distinguished Visiting Scholar culminated in Sunday night’s performance, which was meant not only to showcase classical music but also to delve into the intricacies—and, in Levin’s words, fallibility—of Mozart.

Sunday’s concert functioned as a workshop rather than only a showcase of the finished product. As HRO members performed certain sections, Gardiner and Levin offered their opinions on the orchestra’s execution and on the concerto as a whole. A few lines into the opening movement, Levin directed the discussion toward Mozart’s manuscript of the piece by highlighting the orchestra’s pace and its familiarity to the listener. “It seems axiomatic that the pace should unfold in that order because that is how you’ve heard it,” Levin said. As he immediately revealed, however, popular knowledge of the concerto is incomplete. Levin claimed that Mozart’s original manuscript had different pacing and ordering, but the composer later modified the piece to its final form—a conclusion supported by the corrective cue signs drawn onto the manuscript. This revelation segued into the HRO members’ performance of the opening segment as Mozart had written originally, an experience Gardiner afterward described as strange.

The performance was full of such moments as Gardiner and Levin delved further into the concerto and its reflection of Mozart as an artist. “The C minor manuscript is unique...in its disorder,” Levin said. According to him, Mozart tended to adjust the time spent on his compositions around his other commissions; this habit resulted in instances in which he would work on three pieces simultaneously. For Levin, the muddled drafts prove that Mozart is not the perfect genius of popular perception. “There’s something much more human [about Mozart], much less puppet-like than what is painted,” he said.

This more emotive aspect of Mozart became the focal point of the rehearsal as Gardiner encouraged greater expression from HRO members to better reflect the intricacy within Mozart’s compositions. “You could definitely feel that [Gardiner] was bringing a different perspective, a huge amount of knowledge to the music…. He was so invested in the music that he made you want to feel like you were invested in the music as well,” says Wentong Zhang ’18, a violinist in HRO.

Gardiner also focused on the interaction among the orchestral sections. “There’s so much wonderful dialogue between the piano and the wind instruments,” he said at one point. To foster this communication, he directed the HRO members to play their parts in a complementary manner—once asking wind instruments to slowly soften and string instruments to move up the scale as a way to make the piece converge. “This is music to converse with. It’s essentially dialectic,” Gardiner said.

This conversational quality within the music is what makes it require finesse to play and practice. “[This piece] has many challenges…. We’re just scratching the surface,” Gardiner said. Due to the piece’s difficulty, the HRO members who participated in the performance had rehearsed three times with Gardiner prior to Sunday’s open rehearsal. The members expressed the opinion that the collaboration between Gardiner and HRO was a transformative and informative event for those involved. “It was definitely a very special experience. Having the opportunity to work with one of the world’s leading musicians is something not easy to find,” Zhang says.

For Zhang, the open rehearsal meant more than just the opportunity to work with a renowned conductor like Gardiner. “These bits of information [about Mozart’s composition] are pretty rare to find, even in program notes.… These details definitely enhance the experience a lot,” he says. And as Gardiner and Levin had planned at the beginning of the concert, the concert eventually achieved its plan to encourage performers and audience members to question and think about playing Mozart.