Mozart’s Requiem and the Levin completion – a talk by Lloyd Buck, 11 February 2021

Portishead Choral Society’s second series of Zoom talks starts on Thursday, February 11th at 7:30pm for 7:45pm. The speaker will be Lloyd Buck who is a busy music teacher and pianist living in the North West, who has accompanied and sung with PCS. He will present aspects of Mozart’s Requiem and the completion by Robert Levin. Lloyd writes:

It was in my singing days as a teenager with PCS that I first got to know the work through the ubiquitous Sussmayr completion. I have a particular love of Mozart’s music, although when I first encountered the Requiem, I couldn’t believe that some of it was not by Mozart. As time went on however, it became clear just how many problems there are with Sussmayr’s completion, and when I actually studied the work in detail for a performance that I was directing in Ellesmere Port, I realised just how little Mozart wrote. The completion by Robert Levin is, I believe, the most ‘Mozartean’ of all the completions currently available, and I’m sure that the members of PCS will be intrigued.