“It may be the Mostly Mozart Festival, but this season it will also have some George Benjamin, who will be the festival’s composer-in-residence,” writes Michael Cooper in Wednesday’s (4/8) New York Times. In addition to a new staging of Benjamin’s opera Written on Skin, “Benjamin will conduct a program featuring a concert version of his 2006 chamber opera, Into the Little Hill, based on the story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. A late-night recital will feature music by one of Mr. Benjamin’s students, Dai Fujikura. And another will feature the pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard performing Shadowlines, a piece by Mr. Benjamin, on a program with music by Bach, Mozart, Scriabin and Webern. The Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra will open the season July 25 with a free concert at Avery Fisher Hall, playing Mozart’s Symphony No. 34 and Brahms’s Symphony No. 4, led by its music director, Louis Langrée. The festival will end Aug. 22 with Haydn’s The Creation…. Several conductors [will make] their festival debuts, including Cristian Măcelaru, Cornelius Meister and Alan Gilbert, who will lead the Mahler Chamber Orchestra in the performances of Written on Skin.” Soloists include pianists Jeremy Denk, Emanuel Ax, and Jean-Yves Thibaudet, and violinist Joshua Bell.

Posted April 8, 2015