In August 1993, the pianist Robert Levin sat down in Walthamstow Assembly Rooms with the conductor Christopher Hogwood and the Academy of Ancient Music (AAM) to record the complete piano concertos of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Mozart was big – the bicentenary celebrations of 1991 had made a global impact. And Hogwood and the AAM were big too. After their groundbreaking period-instrument Mozart symphony cycle a decade earlier, the 27 piano concertos seemed like a wholly achievable ambition. What could go wrong?
‘For Mozart’s contemporaries, what surpassed even his virtuosity was his ability to improvise’
Only, as it turned out, the entire classical record industry. The project was meant to take a decade but in 2000 the record label, Decca, lost its nerve and pulled the plug. Hogwood died in 2014 with the cycle still unfinished. And yet two decades, a global pandemic and two changes of music director later, Levin and the Academy are about to bring it to completion.
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