Langree, Louis

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    A Farewell to Mostly Mozart, and to Its Music Director

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    Louis Langrée led a week of concerts to conclude his two-decade tenure with the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra.After 21 years, Louis Langrée’s tenure as music director of the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra has ended. As a farewell, he conducted two programs across four evenings last week, and the music he made was uplifting, staggeringly beautiful and, finally, triumphant.The ensemble used to be associated with a festival of the same name, but that was quietly shuttered after the 2019 season. Next year, the players will have a new name and a new music director. But the sound of the orchestra — which draws its musicians from the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Philharmonic, Orchestra of St. Luke’s and several other groups — as it is known today was built by Langrée.“What I have learned and shared has made life more beautiful,” Langrée told the audience on Friday, during an evening that became an extended goodbye, with breaks for recollections, reflections and even musical demonstrations à la Leonard Bernstein (whom he cited as an influence). Langrée struck up the band as he explained the deceptive simplicity of Mozart’s melodic writing or the off-kilter minuet of the 40th Symphony. But he caught himself: “It’s a concert, not a lecture,” he said with a chuckle.His first program of the week, on Tuesday, was a motley assortment of pieces by Lully, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Kodaly and Valerie Coleman, taking the orchestra’s tasting-platter approach to an extreme. Coleman’s “Fanfare for Uncommon Times,” written without strings or woodwinds, was a study in layered, graduated brass timbres. The orchestra dug into the saturated colors and whiz-bang energy of Kodaly’s “Dances of Galanta” and brought a bountiful tone to a Mozart overture and selections from Lully’s “Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme.”The 27-year-old violinist Randall Goosby, making his Mostly Mozart debut, was luminous in Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto — his tone luscious, elegant and sweet without being syrupy. His unforced ease and alluringly relaxed vibrato gave his legato suppleness, and his trill was an act of gracefulness instead of athleticism. When the orchestra re-entered with the first movement’s main theme, it felt like a catharsis of the joy Goosby had cultivated.Compared with the stylistic whiplash of Tuesday, Friday was magnificently lucid: a jubilant tour through Mozart’s final three symphonies. Langrée referred to the pieces as the “holy trinity” of Mozart’s symphonic output, all written in the summer of 1788. The program’s sense of occasion, its feeling of culmination, turned Langrée wistful; he thanked the ushers, stage crews and security personnel and expressed pride in the Mostly Mozart players, most of whom he hired himself. “This place will stay magical for me,” he said.At the final program, Langrée was presented with a bouquet of roses that he then gave out to each member of the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra.Lawrence Sumulong/Lincoln CenterLangrée is a Mozartean of vibrancy, potency and efficiency. Mozart is about harmoniousness — requiring an orchestra to balance color, style and execution in a reflection of the music’s essential consonance — but Langrée treats that quality as a starting point. Then he finds expressive freedom, something like romance, but attacks it incisively. The music bursts with feeling as it flies by in tidy fashion.The works came in chronological order, starting with the Symphony No. 39, in which the players unleashed sonorous drama in the Adagio-Allegro and wholly conceived melodic statements in the Andante con Moto (which featured Christopher Pell’s dreamy clarinet). Langrée didn’t shortchange the minuet’s clipped phrases, and the concluding Allegro had a windswept quality.He brought expansiveness to these late symphonies without distending them and let them breathe without slowing them down. In the 40th, Langrée crafted a fast, finely wrought opening filled with slender sound that kept anxiety and release in constant tension. The Allegro Assai, full of life, had dash as well as elegant form.After intermission on Friday, Langrée got candid. He pushed back against the way “Lincoln Center wants to present less classical because it’s elitist,” adding that the center can and should embrace hip-hop and R&B without abandoning Mostly Mozart fare. He pleaded with the audience to return next year to support the musicians, even if Mozart’s name is being “erased from the orchestra.”Langrée located the greatness of the “Jupiter” Symphony in its compassion rather than its grandeur. He cushioned the assertive opening and deftly scaled back to something human — a sly smile, a sense of generosity. The winds peeked through with their peculiar colors, and the fugato finale churned briskly.There will invariably be lapses in music whose finery never allows players to hide. Occasionally, the violins turned gray, or the horns lost their gleam. The endless runs of the Andante Cantabile in the “Jupiter” had an admirable singing quality most, if not all, of the time.On Saturday, for Langrée’s last concert with the orchestra, the audience greeted him with a standing ovation when he entered, and applauded him and the players for nearly 20 minutes at the end.The previous night, Langrée had talked — and sung — through the five parts that make up the “Jupiter” fugue before leading the orchestra in an even more effervescent encore of it. At each of the final two concerts, he was presented with a bouquet of red roses and gave out stems to each of the players. He tossed one to the audience, then kept one for himself. More

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      Review: At Mostly Mozart, the Sense of an Ending

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      Louis Langrée, in his last season with the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, conducted a classic Langrée program: Mozart and a premiere by Amir ElSaffar.Change is coming for the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra and for its longtime music director, Louis Langrée — this month is the beginning of the end of his tenure with the orchestra. When the ensemble appears at Lincoln Center next year it will be with a freshly conceived name, and with the conductor Jonathon Heyward at the helm. (Heyward also leads the orchestra in concerts on Aug. 4 and 5.)So there is a sense of finality hovering over this summer’s offerings, which began last weekend with a free outdoor concert in Damrosch Park. On Tuesday night, Langrée and his players resumed their more typical places in the recently refurbished David Geffen Hall — renovations that kept the festival orchestra out of that theater last year.In remarks before the concert, Langrée warmly recalled his two-decade relationship with the orchestra and with New York audiences. The program was classic Langrée: a substantial world premiere from Amir ElSaffar, a prominent jazz trumpeter and composer, nestled next to the Mass in C minor by Mozart, who, Langrée noted, sometimes looked eastward (as in the “Turkish March” movement of Piano Sonata No. 11).ElSaffar also spoke, telling the audience how his “Dhikra” (“Remembrance”) — inspired by the 20th anniversary of the second U.S. invasion of Iraq — incorporated Western classical instruments from the festival orchestra’s ranks, alongside the players in his Two Rivers ensemble. (Among other instruments, that group features oud, a steel-string lute and an Iraqi hammered dulcimer, as well as ElSaffar’s trumpet, which channels the melodic style of Iraq’s maqam tradition.)The composer Amir ElSaffar, performing in “Dhikra,” his world premiere, on Tuesday.Lawrence SumulongAll cogent and stylistically broad minded as a précis. But “Dhikra” is not on the same exalted level as ElSaffar’s past work for larger groups, particularly as heard on the album “Not Two” (2017). While “Dhikra” contained some passages of wondrous blended sonority, the amplification of ElSaffar’s musicians had the unfortunate effect of making the Mostly Mozart players inaudible, and for long stretches.It began promisingly enough, with Two Rivers players positioned on the stage near Langrée, and with 10 festival orchestra musicians — the only ones participating in this piece — strewn among the audience, one level up from the orchestra. (The conductor often faced the audience, in order to conduct his far-flung orchestral partners.)A convening salvo from ElSaffar’s trumpet — mellow yet mournful — seemed to inspire droning notes in the strings that gradually flowered into plucked passages that ricocheted across the hall. And when fervid motifs for oboe, clarinet, bassoon and French horn — all positioned at the back of the house — mingled with gentle notes from the Two Rivers bassist onstage, there was a glorious sense of collective blooming.But this was not to last. The orchestral players soon left their stations in the audience, gradually reappearing onstage. And it was there that the amplified nature of Two Rivers tended to swamp ElSaffar’s writing for his Mostly Mozart collaborators. (It was sad to see the violinist Ruggero Allifranchini sawing away with abandon, at a climactic moment, and not be able to hear his contributions over the Two Rivers rhythm section.)Some of this might be improved with slight tweaks to the levels on the Geffen Hall mixer. But some of the balance problems may be baked into the piece as written; 10 musicians is not a significant enough portion of an orchestra to graft onto a group as potent as Two Rivers.After intermission, audiences got to feel the full force of the festival orchestra in Mozart’s Mass in C minor. Also on hand were a quartet of vocal soloists — including the soprano Erin Morley — and a double chorus (well drilled by the director Malcolm J. Merriweather).Following his own edition of Mozart’s unfinished score, Langrée managed to inject an airy, delicate sense of bounce into the gravity of the Kyrie. Taken too sternly, the Mass sounds overindebted to Bach. Taken too lightly, you skate around the profundity of the work. Langrée found the right balance throughout. And he had a star turn from Morley, when it came to a showstopping “Et Incarnatus Est” aria, in the Credo.Change, for this festival and for classical music on the whole, is inevitable. But this Mass was a reminder of the wonders that should be carefully shepherded going forward. After Langrée departs, it will be important for the leaders of this orchestra — whatever it’s called — to continue to balance interpretations of this high order and taking big swings with artists on the level of ElSaffar.Mostly MozartProgram repeats Wednesday night at David Geffen Hall, Lincoln Center, lincolncenter.org. More

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      Louis Langrée Wraps Up a Quietly Transformative Era of Conducting

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      Rehearsals led by the conductor Louis Langrée tend to follow a trajectory. Early on, he speaks poetically and tells stories; during preparations for a May concert with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, where he is the music director, he explained Saint-Saëns with references to the Kyrie of a Mass and the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. But then his language becomes technical and specific; that day, broad explanations of mood gave way to meticulous balance and bowing as the playing took shape like an increasingly detailed, fine sculpture.Langrée wasn’t afraid, at that point, to repeat a phrase until it was right. Musicians are capable of understanding a direction when it’s given to them, he said in an interview later, “but they need to feel it, physically.”The result is often an interpretation rich in specificity and color, to a degree that can impress even seasoned musicians. On that program in Cincinnati, Vikingur Olafsson joined the orchestra as the soloist in Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G, and although he had toured the piece all season, he felt that rehearsing it with Langrée, a Frenchman, was like “talking about Chopin with someone in Warsaw.” And, Olafsson added, “there were things that I hadn’t heard before, and that’s a big compliment.”And yet, at 62, Langrée has never been one of the world’s most famous or sought-after conductors. His career has been a steady climb of prestige and quality, quietly remarkable but undersung even as he has transformed ensembles: in Cincinnati, where he has been at the podium for a decade, and in New York, where he has been the music director of the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra since 2003.Langrée conducting in Cincinnati. “He’d rather leave five years too early,” Jonathan Martin, the orchestra’s chief executive, said, “than stay five minutes too late.”Madeleine Hordinski for The New York TimesHis time at both posts, though, is coming to an end. Lincoln Center has dropped the Mostly Mozart Festival, keeping its orchestra but changing its music director and name, so Langrée is set to depart this summer at the end of his contract; and his tenure in Cincinnati concludes next season. All this, as he settles into his new job as the leader — not the conductor — of the Opéra Comique in Paris.Cincinnati, which is still searching for his successor, will have a mourning period, said Jonathan Martin, that orchestra’s chief executive. But Langrée is returning to France on a high note.“He’d rather leave five years too early,” Martin said, “than stay five minutes too late.”BORN IN MULHOUSE, France, Langrée is a proud Alsatian, who studied in the region at the Strasbourg Conservatory. From there, his work was primarily as a vocal coach and assistant conductor, at institutions including the Orchestre de Paris, where he encountered eminences like Pierre Boulez, Georg Solti and Daniel Barenboim.Solti passed down a bit of wisdom for conductors he had heard from Richard Strauss: Go into the hall to listen. Langrée doesn’t always need to do that, though, because he leans on the ears of his assistants, like Samuel Lee in Cincinnati. Langrée said that Lee “knows what I like,” and turned back to check in with him often during the May rehearsals, asking about articulation and whether specific textures were coming through.Starting in the early 1990s, Langrée began to pick up podium appointments in Europe, including at the Opéra National de Lyon and Glyndebourne Touring Opera. He said that his children practically grew up at Glyndebourne, in England; his daughter, Céleste, is now studying scenic design at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, he added, because she was brought up by stage hands instead of nannies.Langrée first conducted the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra in 1998, in a program that included Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 in G minor. He still remembers details of those rehearsals — working with the ensemble to perfect the style of a minuet by way of connecting the piece to “West Side Story” — and of quickly developing a relationship with the players, who were assembled from a variety of sources, like Lincoln Center institutions and Broadway.In 2002, he was appointed music director after the departure of the orchestra’s longtime conductor, Gerard Schwarz, and a strike that left the players’ morale battered. The ensemble was no critic’s favorite, but once Langrée took over, “he put his heart and soul into every aspect” of it, said Jane Moss, who shepherded Lincoln Center’s artistic programming from 1992 until 2020.Langrée rehearsing Saint-Saëns at Music Hall in Cincinnati.Madeleine Hordinski for The New York TimesThe orchestra, and the Mostly Mozart Festival, flourished under the leadership of Moss and Langrée. He hired most of the ensemble in its current form — he is particularly proud of Ryan Roberts, “this genius” from the New York Philharmonic, who recently joined as principal oboe — and steadily turned it into a powerhouse of Classical style.At the same time, the festival’s repertoire broadened, the programming including contemporary music; idiosyncratic, interdisciplinary performance; and international hits like George Benjamin’s opera “Written on Skin” and Barrie Kosky’s staging of “The Magic Flute.” The ambition, Moss said, flowed from her and Langrée’s relationship as “muses to each other.”“She needed me, and I needed her,” Langrée said. Moss agreed, adding: “We fed each other a very special energy. And that came through to the audience. It was about communicating how much he loved music. It was a golden age, and he was really its star.”When Langrée took over in Cincinnati in 2013, he moved his family there based on advice he had heard from Simon Rattle about his time with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. Rattle, he recalled, told him: “If you want to have a deep experience as a music director, you should live in the city. It’s more than conducting many concerts or programs. You have to understand the power and weakness of the city, and think about how the orchestra can be part of the solutions.”Choosing to live in Cincinnati, said Martin, the orchestra’s chief executive, “inevitably led to roots growing out into the community.” Langrée was even an active parent at Walnut Hills High School — where Céleste was involved in theater and his son, Antoine, played in the band; and where he conducted the school orchestra several times. He was tickled by the fact that he worked in the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood of the city, given that he was born “over the Rhine” in Alsace.Living there also meant that Langrée was present to see the Cincinnati Symphony through the darkest days of the pandemic shutdown; he devised ways, almost immediately, to commission new music and stream concerts for free online. “The thing that was important to Louis was to keep things going,” Martin said.The Cincinnati Symphony today, as with the Mostly Mozart orchestra, is largely a product of Langrée’s efforts. He was actively involved in the renovation of its home theater, Music Hall, and has hired, Martin said, “somewhere between a third and half” of the players. The ensemble has built a reputation on nurturing new works on the scale of concertos and symphonies; 65 of those were led by Langrée during his directorship. And, crucially, the group is performing at a level of excellence that reflects his taste for color and nuance.“He’s set a high bar,” Martin said. “It’s not going to be easy to find someone at least as good.”“He’s set a high bar,” Martin said of Langrée in Cincinnati. “It’s not going to be easy to find someone at least as good.”Madeleine Hordinski for The New York TimesLangrée told the Cincinnati Symphony in 2021 that he wouldn’t renew his contract there beyond the 2023-24 season. That year, he was hired by President Emmanuel Macron of France to run the Opéra Comique; it was, Langrée said, the first job he had ever applied for.His departure from Mostly Mozart, though, was blurrier. His contract there was set to conclude this summer, but there was no formal announcement about whether he would renew. The festival had gone dark in 2020, and by the time it would have come back, last year, Lincoln Center had a new artistic leader, Shanta Thake, who rolled out a summer series that included no festival proper and fewer performances than before by the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra. The 2019 edition was unceremoniously the festival’s last. How, Langrée said, could he renew for something that doesn’t exist?Langrée didn’t want to say more about the end of his Mostly Mozart tenure — by any measure a triumph of ensemble-building and musical curiosity. He wanted to protect the players, and for the orchestra to continue. Recently, Jonathon Heyward was made its music director, an appointment that came with the news that the group’s name would change.Thake said that, as a New Yorker who knows the Mostly Mozart orchestra as a beloved New York institution, she can see that going into Langrée’s final season, “they’re stronger than ever.” And there are still echt Langrée performances to come, like a pairing of Mozart’s C-minor Mass and a premiere by Amir ElSaffar, beginning July 25.Langrée moved to Paris once he started at the Opéra Comique, and when he is working in the United States, his day begins early, with about three hours of meetings before rehearsal starts. It’s a challenge, but in the future, he will conduct less: Beyond his concerts in Cincinnati next season, he has only a couple of guest appearances.In lieu of score study, he is now getting acquainted with the nonartistic side of his field, stressed now not about orchestral concerts, but about, say, the effect of inflation on the cost of running a theater.“It’s the last major project of my life,” he said of his job with the Opéra Comique. He will conduct one production there each season. And, as a guest, he will lead a “much-reduced repertoire” that he wants to explore more deeply than he could as a music director. Those moments, which he referred to as a “luxury,” will almost be the easy part of his career’s new phase.“I come from a musical background,” Langrée said. “When you have to read these Excel things and have to balance budgets and work with subsidies from the government — now, I feel like I’ve been plunged into real life. And that’s hard.” More

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      At Mostly Mozart Concerts, Casual Vibes and High Musical Values

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      The Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra offered a series of breezy but focused programs at Lincoln Center, filled with treats big and small.The Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra bears the name of a festival that no longer exists, but over the last three weeks, it played 12 concerts that showed it still has a place in the new creative landscape at Lincoln Center.In April, Lincoln Center announced a newly streamlined festival for this year, “Summer for the City,” that subsumed (or really replaced) a sprawling collection of offerings, including the Mostly Mozart Festival and Midsummer Night Swing. Lincoln Center’s chief artistic officer, Shanta Thake, has said that the organization plays a civic role, so while the updated lineup still sprawls, its emphasis is squarely on community. Social dances, celebratory gatherings for Pride and Juneteenth and a tribute to the Brooklyn-born hip-hop star Notorious B.I.G. have filled the schedule, with many events at no cost.Classical music, a longtime centerpiece of Lincoln Center’s identity, was allotted roughly two and a half weeks of prime time in the middle of its three-month calendar.How does a genre that has wrestled with accusations of elitism fit with the populism of “Summer for the City”? The Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra and its music director, Louis Langrée, wasted no time finding out, offering up breezy yet focused concerts that unfurled as effortlessly as a picnic blanket — welcoming, comforting and filled with treats big and small.I attended the first four programs before being sidelined by COVID-19, and the concerts I saw were a joyous success. They largely followed a template of spotlighting highly personable soloists and making a quiet point of incorporating works by Black composers after years of neglect.As a siren sounded in the distance while Conrad Tao performed at Damrosch Park, he paused and shot the audience a look as if to say, “I’ll wait.”Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesThe series began with a free show at Damrosch Park that juxtaposed works by Black composers and their contemporaries. Joseph Boulogne’s rousing overture to “L’Amant Anonyme” flowed seamlessly into a briskly elegant account of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 17. A glassy, small-scale piece by William Grant Still connected more tenuously to George Gershwin’s ecstatic “Rhapsody in Blue.”Taking a jubilant jaunt through Gershwin’s crowd-pleaser, the pianist Conrad Tao seemed to conduct his own symphony at the keyboard, plunking out a pitter-patter of notes, coloring in sunset shades and slamming his forearm delightedly on the keys. At one point, as a siren sounded in the distance, he paused and shot the audience a look as if to say, “I’ll wait.” The crowd loved it.Before the concert, Thake led the audience in a spoken ritual derived from the three themes of “Summer for the City” — remember, reclaim and rejoice — a reflection on the healing process that communities have undertaken during the pandemic.The orchestra played six programs in total, performing each twice, on consecutive days. The other five programs, all at Alice Tully Hall, had a choose-what-you-pay model, with a minimum price of $5. The concerts lasted 90 minutes or less without intermission.Concertgoers at the Damrosch Park concert on July 19.Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesWhether it was the ticket prices, the inviting run times or the chance to escape the enervating heat, concertgoers seemed energized and unguardedly enthusiastic, often applauding between symphonic movements (though, instinctively, not after the slow ones). And why not, given the conductor Xian Zhang’s tight, decisive reading of Beethoven’s Fourth in the first Alice Tully Hall program? Summer seems a good time to shed some layers and some concert decorum.There’s something heartening about audiences in shorts and T-shirts leaping to their feet in a concert hall to cheer well-turned showpieces by Ravel, Barber and Jacques Ibert. It shakes loose the idea that casual vibes are incompatible with high musical values.The luminous Trinidadian soprano Jeanine De Bique sang a rendition of Samuel Barber’s “Knoxville: Summer of 1915” so touching and minutely observed that I instinctively reached for my husband’s hand. De Bique’s voice, rich and grounded, seemed to bloom from somewhere deep inside her, taking on a slender, shimmery quality as it extended toward the top of her range.Other soloists included the saxophonist Steven Banks, who radiated mellow glamour in the long lines of a Glazunov concerto; the violinist Augustin Hadelich, who dug into the raw strangeness of Ravel’s “Tzigane” and drew out the warm midrange of his Guarneri violin in a relative rarity by Boulogne; and the violinist Joshua Bell, who played pieces by Florence Price and Henri Vieuxtemps in a concert I missed led by Jonathon Heyward, who will become the first Black music director of the Baltimore Symphony in 2023.The replacement of printed programs with QR codes felt like a budgetary constraint, a nonchalant trimming of concert amenities and a nod to our new, continuing pandemic normal. But it drew at least one loud complaint from an attendee.As if in reply, Langrée took the stage and offered entertaining explanatory remarks — a new tradition in the making — before his translucent account of Ravel’s “Mother Goose” Suite. The conductor Roderick Cox spoke movingly of his program a few nights later, though the distinctive atmosphere of Barber’s “Knoxville” and Copland’s “Appalachian Spring” Suite suffered from his unshaped orchestral climaxes.There were new frontiers, too: Nokuthula Ngwenyama wrote the beautifully direct “Primal Message” (2020), a more emotive version of the Arecibo message sent into space in 1974, and the ensemble’s musicians invited concertgoers to mingle with them in the lobby after each concert.If the series told a story — one of remembrance, reclamation and exultation — then it seemed appropriate to conclude with Mozart’s Requiem, a piece of vaulting yet intensely personal feeling, which I was sad to miss on Friday and Saturday.But there’s another story here: Langrée’s contract runs through the 2023 season, and the orchestra’s contract is up for negotiation in February. (Thake has already expressed a desire to engage it next season.)If these concerts felt like the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra’s audition to join Thake’s new Lincoln Center, then the ensemble did everything it could to secure its part. More

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      Review: Mostly Mozart Returns to Lincoln Center, Quietly

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      The center’s summertime music series has a limited outdoor run this week.The Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, the headliner ensemble of Lincoln Center’s summertime music series, is the latest group to return to live performance in New York. But unlike some organizations, it sneaked back into action quietly.Early Monday evening, Louis Langrée, the orchestra’s music director, led 13 players in a Mozart masterpiece, the “Gran Partita” Serenade for Winds in B flat. The informal performance — a surprise pop-up, produced with little promotion — took place on the inviting artificial lawn with which Lincoln Center has covered its plaza.Louis Langrée, the orchestra’s music director, led the performance.Douglas Segars for The New York TimesThe concert, and other offerings in the center’s Restart Stages venture this summer, was conceived at a time when arts institutions were being especially careful to avoid attracting oversize crowds because of fears of the virus spreading. Those concerns, of course, linger.But I wish the revival, however modest, of Mostly Mozart had been more touted. In addition to crowd control, the center’s reticence might have to do with the questionable fate of the venerable festival: As my colleague Javier C. Hernández reported Tuesday in announcing the news of the center’s new artistic leader, officials there say they are still working out Mostly Mozart’s future. That’s not reassuring, especially since it was only four years ago that the center, grappling with budget woes, dissolved the Lincoln Center Festival to focus on reinventing Mostly Mozart.Despite the limited publicity, a couple hundred people, including children scampering up and sliding down the curved artificial turf walls, were already on the lawn before the performance began. As the players took their seats and started warming up with Langrée, the crowd grew even larger.On a balmy evening, a crowd gathered on the artificial turf lawn that has covered the plaza since the spring.Douglas Segars for The New York TimesLangrée spoke to the audience about how special the occasion was for the musicians — the “first time in two years that Mostly Mozart gets together again.” He announced a schedule of performances for the rest of the week, including two more pop-ups, both at 6 p.m.: On Tuesday, a performance of a Mozart duo for violin and viola accompanying two dancers from the New York City Ballet, and on Wednesday, Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 and Mozart’s Divertimento in D (K. 136). On Friday in Damrosch Park, at 8 p.m., the full orchestra will play Mozart’s first and final symphonies.Monday’s performance was wonderful; hearing the music in that space amid grateful New Yorkers was inspiring. The musicians, who played splendidly, were visibly moved.In the “Gran Partita” Serenade, Mozart achieves an uncanny blend of breeziness and grandeur. The music seems genial and sunny, yet is also intricate and complex, almost epic: The piece has seven movements and lasts some 45 minutes. The scoring is heftier than was typical of wind serenades at the time. Along with the standard two bassoons and two oboes, two clarinets are fortified by two basset horns (a deeper alto clarinet); two French horns are doubled to four; and a string bass brings added depth.The ensemble will give a series of performances this week at the center.Douglas Segars for The New York TimesSubtle amplification allowed intricate details to come through beautifully. Langrée and the players — determined, it seemed, to draw in listeners — played whole stretches with mellow sound and soft-spoken grace, especially in the sublime slow movement. Yet the feistier episodes were full-bodied and exciting. The concluding rondo was exceptionally rousing.It was gratifying to see how many people who might not have anticipated hearing this performance wound up standing near the players or sitting on the lawn, listening closely, including mothers swaying to the music with babies in their arms. Mostly Mozart is back, for the time being, even if many music lovers in New York didn’t know it.Mostly Mozart Festival OrchestraEvents this week listed at mostlymozartmusicians.com. More