“Things have changed in recent years at the Mostly Mozart Festival: Over two evenings this past week, in five diverse programs, not a single work by the festival’s namesake was performed,” writes Anthony Tommasini in Friday’s (7/26) New York Times. “Not that I’m complaining. When Louis Langrée became the music director of this venerable Lincoln Center summer event in 2003, he and Jane Moss, the center’s artistic director, agreed … to introduce new initiatives, broaden the repertory, and invite living composers to take part.… At the Kaplan Penthouse, the cellist Kian Soltani and the pianist Julio Elizalde [performed] three selections from Reza Vali’s ‘Persian Folk Songs’ … ‘Persian Fire Dance,’ which Mr. Soltani wrote for himself, is a composite of melodic bits and intense ruminations from Western and Persian traditions…. Pianist and composer Michael Brown made his festival debut … with a colorful account of Mendelssohn’s impetuous ‘Variations Sérieuses,’ then played his own flinty yet playfully pointillist ‘Folk Variations.’ … I attended the opening of ‘The Black Clown’ … an arresting work of music theater adapted from a Langston Hughes poem…. I bet that Mozart, a true man of the theater, would have been proud to share the stage.”
Posted August 1, 2019
