The Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra and Music Director Louis Langrée in performance at Lincoln Center. Photo: Lincoln Center.
In Monday’s (8/21) New Yorker, Alex Ross writes, “Musical summers in New York may never have been as rich as they were in the first two decades of the current century, when the Mostly Mozart Festival … and the Lincoln Center Festival … vied with each other in the conjuring of lavishly varied seasons…. You encountered not only the usual array of Mozart symphonies and concertos, which had been attracting steady crowds since 1966, but also Baroque music-and-dance spectacles by Mark Morris; orchestral cycles of Bruckner and Varèse; Wagner’s … ‘Ring’; Chen Shi-Zheng’s … ‘Peony Pavilion’; Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s apocalyptic antiwar opera, ‘Die Soldaten’; Davóne Tines and Michael Schachter’s apocalyptic anti-racist revue, ‘The Black Clown’; and avant-garde evenings of Pauline Oliveros and Kaija Saariaho, not to mention Persian ritual theatre, Georgian polyphony, Noh dramas, and Thai rock. Those days are gone. The Lincoln Center Festival shut down in 2017; Mostly Mozart finished expiring this month. Lincoln Center’s programming division … is concentrating its energies on a series called ‘Summer for the City.’… The farewell season of the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, which once played for seven weeks or more a year, consisted of thirteen concerts in the course of three weeks…. Although the traditional performing arts have abiding issues with élitism and exclusivity, a swerve toward pop hardly compensates for [today’s] profound societal inequalities … Lincoln Center’s new leadership has implemented one excellent idea: a pay-what-you-wish plan … The moniker Mostly Mozart worked for so long because it symbolized a longing for uncanny voyages. The festival’s time may have passed, but the longing remains.”
