"Mozart Requiem, Levin Completion." These words, from the program of the October 27 opening concert of the Orchestra of St. Luke's 2005–2006 season at Carnegie Hall, refer in perhaps the briefest way imaginable to one of the most dramatic myths in music history, and one of its most astounding masterpieces.

Playwright Peter Shaffer chose good theater over good history in his play Amadeus when he adapted a popular legend and put a scheming Antonio Salieri at Mozart's deathbed, taking down the final pages of the Requiem as dictated by the composer, hoping to pass it off as his own. In fact, Mozart knew he would probably die before finishing the work, and so discussed it with his friend and pupil Franz Xaver Süssmayr, who completed the score two months after Mozart's death at the request of Constanze, the composer's wife. This was accepted as closest to Mozart's intent, but in the succeeding two centuries, the temptation to tinker what many have viewed as a rather plodding, "un-Mozartean" adaptation by a good student has resulted in revisions from musicians and musicologists alike, including Richard Strauss, Bruno Walter, and Sir Thomas Beecham.

Enter Robert Levin, an American pianist and scholar, whose use of the 18th-century practice of improvising embellishments and cadenzas in performance has both thrilled and startled critics and audiences, resulting in both praise for his mastery of the Classical music language and the comment, "Would you want your daughter to marry a man who tried to improve on Mozart?" As an undergraduate at Harvard—where he is now a professor—Levin developed an interest in Mozart's uncompleted works, and he has to date "completed" around a dozen, including the Horn Concerto in D, the Sinfonia concertante for winds and orchestra, and, most recently, the Mass in C minor.

It is Levin's 1991 edition of the Requiem, that dark masterpiece with the storied past, however, that has gained the most attention, and praise, for restoring—by what New York Times critic Jeremy Eichler described as "thinning, grooming and correcting"—that ineffable Mozart transparency and symmetry. Says Levin himself, "the goal was to revise not as much, but as little, as possible, attempting in the revisions to observe the character, textures, voice leading, continuity, and structure of Mozart's music." In some portions, Levin has pared back the orchestration to better hear the vocal parts. Most noticeably, he has added a new "Amen" fugue (from a Mozart sketch) following the "Lacrimosa," so that each of the five liturgical sections of the Requiem ends in a fugue, as was the custom in Mozart's day.

The Orchestra of St. Luke's and Principal Conductor Donald Runnicles continue to enjoy a Mozart honeymoon that began with their very first concert together at the Caramoor International Music Festival (in 1998, the "Jupiter" Symphony), and includes the critically-acclaimed St. Luke's Collection recording of Mozart's Symphonies 39 & 41. Runnicles praises St. Luke's as "an orchestra that was born to play Mozart." The maestro, among whose many hats is that of principal guest conductor of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, has just released a new recording of the Levin edition of the Requiem with the ASO, and its Chamber Chorus (directed by Norman Mackenzie), which immediately hit Billboard's classical charts. Runnicles will bring the chorus—one of the country's most prestigious—for its first performance ever with an orchestra besides its Atlanta parent, to join the Orchestra of St. Luke's and singers Celena Shafer, Kristine Jepson, John Tessier, and Nathan Berg at Carnegie Hall. Hear the the choral magic of Atlanta, the vitality of Robert Levin's reconstruction, and St. Luke's magnificent Mozart on October 27.