Sure, it’s called the Mostly Mozart Festival. But this summer, Lincoln Center could just as easily go with Lotsa Beethoven, as it dives into celebrating that composer’s 250th birthday.
There will be newer fare, too, including Jeanine Tesori’s opera “Blue”; Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s chamber opera “UR_”; and Jonathan Dove’s “Search for Spring,” a “crowd action” for 1,000 voices. And Mozart is hardly being ignored: The festival will open on July 14 with “Divine Connection,” a staged work that weaves Mozart’s Requiem and music by Arvo Pärt.
But there will be much Beethoven, including Stephen Hough playing the “Emperor” Piano Concerto; Joshua Bell, Steven Isserlis and Jeremy Denk teaming up for the Triple Concerto; and the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra performing the Third Piano Concerto (with Kristian Bezuidenhout on the fortepiano) and Violin Concerto (with Isabelle Faust).
The festival will conclude on Aug. 8 with a re-creation of Beethoven’s marathon Akademie concert of 1808, which featured the premieres of the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies and the “Choral Fantasy,” as well the first public performance of the Fourth Piano Concerto, alongside other works. The Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra will be conducted by the festival’s music director, Louis Langrée, who recently led the program with his other ensemble, the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra.
Summer programming at Lincoln Center has been evolving since the decision was made in 2017 to cancel the Lincoln Center Festival — which focused on fully staged performances — and devote its resources to Mostly Mozart, which was once a straightforward concert series. This summer, Mostly Mozart will be confined to about three and a half weeks, its shortest span in years. But it will continue to take on more of the big-ticket events Lincoln Center Festival was known for.
One highlight will be the American premiere of one of Ivan Fischer’s latest outings as a conductor-director: his production of Verdi’s “Falstaff” with the always-game Budapest Festival Orchestra. The Mark Morris Dance Group will bring back Handel’s “L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato,” with Jane Glover conducting. And the dance “Flowers for Kazuo Ohno (and Leonard Cohen),” performed by the Colombian troupe Compañía del Cuerpo de Indias, will pay homage to both Cohen and Ohno, a founder of Butoh, the influential Japanese dance-theater form.
The festival will also continue to spotlight new music. It will give the first New York City performances of “Blue,” an opera about an African-American family whose son is killed by a police officer, which had its premiere at the Glimmerglass Festival last year. And the International Contemporary Ensemble will give the North American premiere of Ms. Thorvaldsdottir’s “UR_.”
Mostly Mozart will continue its recent tradition of mounting large outdoor works with “Search for Spring,” which a thousand singers from across the city — both professional and amateur — will sing in Lincoln Center’s plaza under the direction of the esteemed choral conductor Simon Halsey.
Source: Music - nytimes.com
