There is musical archeology, yawn, and there is Robert D. Levin, of
Harvard, now in residence at the Oregon Bach Festival.

Levin is the Indiana Jones of researchers, digging up 200-year-old
hemidemisemiquavers, while rescuing fabulous babes from phalanxes of
black-clad storm-troopers.

With deep scholarship barely disguised under the Harrison Ford
swashbuckling, Levin joined festival director Helmuth Rilling Friday in
Beall Hall for the last of a three-part Discovery Series exploration of
the Mozart Requiem in Levin's completion.

Speaking of movies, do you remember good old hokey, overblown "Amadeus,"
the nervous film with the great music? That was, more or less, about the
mysterious circumstances of the 1791 commission of the Requiem, just five
months before Mozart's death.  Author Peter Shaffer missed, among other
things, the real mystery, about the completion of the manuscript barely
begun by the fatally ill composer.

As Rilling put at the lecture-demo-concert: How could Franz Xavier
Suessmayr, whose completion of the Requiem the world has been treasuring
for two centuries, write such glorious music...  and nothing else of his
own? According to the widow, Constanze (Sally Fields) Mozart, Suessmayr --
hard as he worked to get the commission payment for the composer's family
-- just put together what already existed.

But, Rilling and Levin jointly explained and demonstrated, the holes vastly
outnumbered what there was.  Apparently not a scrap of paper, not a single
note was provided by Mozart for the last third of the work: the Sanctus,
Benedictus, Agnus Dei, and Communion.  So where did that music come from?
Suessmayr? Not likely, but the chap certainly knew where to steal from,
probably putting together Mozart fragments for other projects.

Levin and Rilling spoke well of Suessmayer, but then took his orchestration
apart, note by note.  Playing only the orchestral accompaniment, usually
masked by the chorus, Rilling pointed out the "primitive" oompapa chords,
Levin spoke of the mechanical nature of some of the writing, against "the
well-known fact that Mozart was congenitally incapable of writing anything
mechanical."

The Rilling-Levin tag-team performance was vastly entertaining, but there
was also much more to it.  I already heard three performances of the Levine
version of the Mozart Requiem in other cities, but this was the first time
I fully appreciated the genuine clarifications and improvements he brought
to the score.

There was the business of a shift from B flat major to D major, done rather
badly by Suessmayr, and just before eyes glazed over in the audience, Levin
leaped across the stage from podium to organ and back again (I was looking
for the giant rolling ball coming his way from the Spielberg version), and
demonstrated how a few notes swiped from "Don Giovanni" provided a
logical transition via D major.  This and the rest of the event, leading
up to the performance of that last portion.

Here, the event shifted from research into the past to featuring the
artists of the future, with some of festival's 24 young conducting
master-class participants taking turns on the podium, presenting a
sterling performance.

Here's the entire list of participants, look among them for the Rillings
of the future:

Maritza Caceres (Monterey, CA), Daniel Canosa (Oregon House, CA), Peggy
Dettwiler (Mansfield, PA), David Fryling (Ann Arbor, MI), Akiko Fujimoto
(Rochester, NY), Susan Haig (Windsor, Ontario, Canada), Chris Kim (Ann
Arbor, MI), Alexis Calvo Lopez (Valencia, Spain), Mark Mangini (New York,
NY), Genaro Mendez (Eugene, OR), Christine Myers (Omaha, NE), David
Phillips (Lynnwood, WA), Timothy Semanik (Ann Arbor, MI), Tomasz Tokarczyk
(Krakow, Poland), Laura Arrington (Eureka, CA), Wishart Bell (South Bend,
IN), Owen Burdick (New York, NY), Kevin Chang (Eugene, OR), Anna DeMichele
(Long Beach, CA), Rodel Flores (Cebu City, the Philippines), Sharon
Harrington (Erie, PA), Christopher Hisey (Fairfield, CT), Melanie
Hladunewich (Edmonton, Alberta, Canada), Helen Hollenbeck (Canby, OR),
James Jirak (Boise, ID), Janet McCullough (Eagle River, AK), Eric Nisula
(Saginaw, MI), Jimmy Reddan (Waldorf, MD), Todd Simmons (Hattiesburg, MS),
Hwa-Sook Choi, Jung Ja Park, Kwon Ok Hong and Shin-Ja Choi, all of Seoul,
Korea.

Janos Gereben/SF
(in Eugene to 7/11)
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