Older and Wiser, a Son of L.A. Returns

When Max Levinson first played with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, his mother gave him this piece of advice: Keep your jacket buttoned when you walk onstage. Unbutton it when you sit down at the piano.

“It was a truly nerve-racking experience,” Levinson recalls. He was 13, the winner of a chance to solo in a Symphonies for Youth concert. “A split second before I was supposed to start, I realized that my jacket was buttoned--which seemed major at the time. I quickly reached down before flinging my hands on the keyboard, so the first two or three bars were horrendous. Friends and family in the audience thought it would ruin me, but fortunately, I recovered.”

This Saturday, Levinson, now 27, is coming full circle, performing at another Symphonies for Youth concert in the morning before making his official Philharmonic debut that night. This time, however, he’s a bit more seasoned.

In the last few years, he’s released two critically acclaimed CDs and performed at venues ranging from London’s Wigmore Hall to New York’s Alice Tully Hall. The Boston Globe selected him as best emerging artist in 1994 and best debut artist three years later. “He has fingers, power, brains and intuition,” wrote The Times’ Daniel Cariaga after hearing him in a recital last December.

Levinson’s breakthrough came two years ago, when he won first prize in the Guardian Dublin International Piano Competition--to everyone’s surprise, including his own. Though he’s often praised for his nuanced interpretations, he’s a fan of David Bowie, Miles Davis, Led Zeppelin and fiery pianist Martha Argerich, a believer in “letting go.”

“My playing is not especially conservative,” he says on the phone from Boston, where he’s lived since entering Harvard a decade ago. “If you do anything unusual, you thrill half the jury and alienate the other half. What’s favored is well-groomed, conservatory factory product, middle-of-the-road. If an unknown [Vladimir] Horowitz and Glenn Gould competed, they’d be considered in terribly bad taste.”

With the prize came a $16,000 check, a Kawai grand piano, two years of professional management services, plus worldwide concert opportunities that included his 1998 New York City and London debuts. “Levinson, the American wunderkind, is a true virtuoso--he makes every phrase, every note say something,” the New York Observer said. London’s Sunday Times was equally enthusiastic: “Max Levinson is quite a discovery and his recordings have great bravura and intelligence.”

New York Newsday praised Levinson for “steering clear of the Rachmaninoff roughage that most young pianists believe they need to earn their virtuoso stripes.” His programs are eclectic, serving up pieces by Chopin and Liszt, as well as Schoenberg and Leon Kirchner.

Levinson scoffs at the frequently expressed notion that it takes courage to tackle new music. And his commitment to it has been “slightly exaggerated,” he says.

“It’s actually easier for me to play newer pieces since they come out of a life more similar to mine than Mozart’s,” he says. “Sure, 9 out of 10 pieces written in the past 10 years are bad, but that was also true in 1780. Some of it can be hard on the listener: Fifteen minutes is fine, but two hours is too much.”

Levinson says that he can only play pieces he loves--which led him to walk away from one high-profile concert in the mid-1990s. Ernest Fleischmann, former executive director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, had asked him to perform Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto at a Hollywood Bowl extravaganza, but Levinson had reservations.

“I didn’t want to seem ungrateful, but I really hate Tchaikovsky,” Levinson says. “His music rubs me the wrong way. When I didn’t return the initial call, Fleischmann phoned and said that, based on my personality and my choice of music, he bet I didn’t care much for the composer. That saved me from turning him down.”

It took confidence to pass on that opportunity, Fleischmann observes. That the pianist decided to wait for a more suitable opportunity suggests that Levinson’s “head is on the right way.”

“Levinson is clear about where he wants to go as an artist,” Fleischmann says. “And I don’t know anyone in his age group with a talent so complete. A lot of pianists can pay loud and fast--or softly--but fail to get that kind of subtlety and richness.”

Levinson is playing Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G with associate conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya on Saturday night and at El Camino College in Torrance on Sunday. The program is much more to his liking.

“Ravel is the greatest orchestrator of all time, someone who understood the sounds he could get out of an orchestra,” Levinson says. “No one utilized the piano better than he. And playing in Los Angeles has great resonance for me. I’ve been in Boston for 10 years, but my heritage is Angeleno--despite the fact I’m now a Red Sox fan.”

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Levinson is the son of a Dutch Indonesian preschool teacher and a father who now makes his living in Spanish-language advertising. Born in the Netherlands, he moved to Los Angeles as an infant. He began piano lessons at age 5 and learned the joy of music at Westwood’s Yamaha Music School. From 7 to 16, he studied with Bruce Sutherland, who taught him technique and discipline. At 10, he set his sights on becoming a concert pianist.

It was at Santa Monica’s Crossroads School, which he entered in eighth grade, that Levinson refined his talent. One of his mentors was Heiichiro Ohyama, who heads a host of local chamber music orchestras and was then the principal violist of the L.A. Philharmonic and conductor of the Crossroads orchestra. Fellow students went on to become concertmasters or associate concertmasters at the Chicago Symphony, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic.

“Angelenos have a complex,” the pianist maintains. “They don’t realize that so many of the exceptional musicians my age come from this city. Being surrounded by them in the [Crossroads] music program fostered a little competition and a lot of support. Since they also headed home to practice instead of to the mall, I felt less like an outsider, less like a nerd.”

At the time, Levinson was a cellist as well, performing in chamber music trios and quartets. After high school graduation, he decided to focus on the piano exclusively--incorporating some of his “cello personality” into his playing.

“It took me a while to get over losing a really big part of my life,” he says. “Not until I integrated my emotional, instinctive approach to the cello with my more cerebral, analytical piano personality did I stop missing the instrument.”

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Leaving L.A. wasn’t easy, Levinson says, but he wanted to tackle a “less comfortable” environment. Instead of going straight to conservatory like many of his peers, he opted for an English literature degree at Harvard, where he graduated cum laude. Studying English honed his communications skills as well as his critical powers, he says. And being part of a diverse student body gave him a sense of balance.

“At conservatory, people listen like musicians--’Mozart would never have approved of staccato at that point,’ ” he says. “In the real world, I discovered, music is more about feeling--being transported out of the hall.”

From 1993-95, Levinson studied at Boston’s New England Conservatory of Music. One of his greatest influences was Patricia Zander, who taught him how to listen. “She helped me realize that playing the piano is not as much something I do with my hands as something I do with my ears,” he says. “It’s a matter of hearing that ‘inner voice,’ the idealized version of a piece. Each of Patricia’s students sounds different. She’s most successful with students who have their own ideas, who already know where they’re going.”

More than 50 concerts are scheduled for the 1999-2000 season, so he’s on the road half the time. That’s tough on relationships, Levinson concedes. But since Allison Elderidge, his wife of eight months, is a professional cellist who travels as well, she knows how much it means.

“I think I’ve turned the corner,” Levinson says. “The challenges have changed. I used to worry about advancing my career, getting more gigs. Now I have wonderful people doing that for me so I can just worry about the music.”

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Max Levinson with the L.A. Philharmonic, Saturday, 8 p.m., Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., $10-$70, (213) 365-3500; and Sunday, 7 p.m., Marsee Auditorium, El Camino College, Crenshaw and Redondo Beach boulevards, Torrance, $4-$48, (310) 329-5345. On Saturday at 11 a.m. he plays with the Philharmonic in a Toyota Symphonies for Youth concert at Chandler Pavilion, $8-$10, (213) 365-3500.