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      The Syncopated Sounds of Old San Juan Hill at the New Geffen Hall

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      Etienne Charles’s composition for the reopening of the hall honors the Afro-diasporic musical heritage of the neighborhood razed to build Lincoln Center.Before there was Lincoln Center, there was San Juan Hill — a diverse neighborhood located in the West 60s in Manhattan. The “hill” refers to a peak at 62nd Street and Amsterdam.To some, the neighborhood’s reputation was synonymous with racial conflict. In a Page 1 article, in 1905, The New York Times reported that, on a weekly basis, the “police of the West Sixty-eighth Street Station expect at least one small riot on the Hill or in The Gut,” a stretch of the neighborhood on West End Avenue, involving the area’s Black and white rival gangs.But beyond the notoriety of the police blotter, a different American cultural story was taking shape on San Juan Hill. Around 1913, James P. Johnson could be found playing piano at the Jungles Casino, on West 62nd Street; the dances he witnessed there, which he described as “wild and comical,” would inspire “The Charleston,” his syncopated Roaring Twenties-defining hit, a decade later.During a recent interview at Lincoln Center, the jazz trumpeter and composer Etienne Charles noted that the musical legacy of San Juan Hill was particularly rich throughout the first half of the 20th century.“Thelonious Monk is from here,” Charles, 39, said. “And Benny Carter — to me Benny Carter is one of the most influential arrangers because he’s one of the first people to do a five-saxophone soli in big band, right? And he’s a great bandleader, a great improviser.”The musical aspect of the San Juan Hill story long predates the era in which the Mayor’s Committee on Slum Clearance, led by Robert Moses, razed the neighborhood to make way for the sprawling Lincoln Center arts complex. (Using eminent domain, Moses’ “urban renewal” project displaced more than 7,000 economically vulnerable families, nearly all of them Black and Hispanic.)It was the lack of a broader appreciation for this history, Charles said, that made him excited to propose a work about San Juan Hill when Lincoln Center approached him in 2020 for a piece to celebrate the reopening of David Geffen Hall. Turns out, the organization had been thinking along similar lines.“It had already been in conversation, here,” Shanta Thake, Lincoln Center’s chief artistic officer, said; the organization was “starting to really think about: What was our history? How do we talk about our history?”They agreed that Charles would compose a piece evoking the old neighborhood — and that it would use the New York Philharmonic, Lincoln Center’s first-ever commission for a full orchestra. “San Juan Hill,” a 75-minute multimedia work, will have its premiere on Oct. 8, when Charles and his group, Creole Soul, join the New York Philharmonic for two performances.“We want to celebrate it and make sure as many people as possible see this as their first piece in the hall,” Thake said. (Tickets for the performances, which will be at 2 p.m. and 8 p.m., were made available on a choose-what-you-pay basis; a limited number of free tickets will be distributed that morning at 10 a.m. at Geffen Hall’s Welcome Center.)The Reopening of David Geffen HallThe New York Philharmonic’s notoriously jinxed auditorium at Lincoln Center has undergone a $550 million renovation.Reborn, Again: The renovation of the star-crossed hall aims to break its acoustic curse — and add a dash of glamour.‘Unfinished Business’: After a 17-year run in Los Angeles, Deborah Borda returned to the New York Philharmonic, which she led in the 1990s, to help usher it into its new home.San Juan Hill: Etienne Charles’s composition for the reopening of the hall honors the Afro-diasporic musical heritage of the neighborhood razed to build Lincoln Center.Timeline: From a troubled opening in 1962 to a full gutting in 1976 to the latest renovations, here is a brief timeline of the long road to the new hall.Thake said Charles’s new work “speaks volumes about what the future can look like” at Lincoln Center, adding that she couldn’t “imagine that it just won’t get deeper with time and that you’ll see more like this.”Charles at the piano. His score for the Philharmonic has a wealth of American musical textures, from vintage stride piano to modern hip-hop.Josefina Santos for The New York TimesAt the Kaplan Penthouse in Lincoln Center’s Rose Building, Charles was seated next to a piano and his score for “San Juan Hill” as he rattled off a roll-call list of all-stars with roots in the neighborhood, including, for a time, the writer Zora Neale Hurston. And he recalled learning about the neighborhood’s cultural legacy shortly after arriving, in 2006, to pursue a master’s degree in jazz studies at Juilliard.During preparations for a concert of Herbie Nichols’s music, the pianist and educator Frank Kimbrough gave Charles his first lesson on the topic — and pointed out a connection to Charles’s background. “He was like, ‘You’re from Trinidad?’” Charles said. “‘Well, Herbie’s parents were from Trinidad, and he was born right there.’ And he pointed to San Juan Hill.”It didn’t take long for that dual message — of local import, and of a broader tie to the West Indies — to be reinforced. When the pianist Monty Alexander stopped by the apartment Charles was sharing with another student, Aaron Diehl, he schooled Charles on a fresh way to hear the music of Monk. “Listen to Monk’s music and you hear that Caribbean bounce,” Alexander told Charles.On the Kaplan Penthouse’s piano, Charles played an appropriately bumptious figure from Monk’s “Bye-Ya” as punctuation for that anecdote. “It’s almost like dancehall,” he said.For Charles, one challenge of “San Juan Hill” was its scope. His first thought was: “I’ve never composed for orchestra,” he said. But thanks to his training at Juilliard, he had studied orchestration and completed some arrangements for orchestra. “So yeah,” he said to himself. “Let’s go.”

      Kaiso by Etienne CharlesWhile reflecting on the music that filtered into and out of San Juan Hill, Charles also went on fact-finding missions — looking through archives and speaking with people who lived in the neighborhood before 1959, including a former leader of one of its many gangs. (Charles said he couldn’t specify which leader or which gang.)Thake said such efforts were emblematic of how “deeply researched and how curious” Charles is as a performer. “He has a deep investment in this place, coming from Juilliard, moving through Jazz at Lincoln Center,” she said, noting that he was one of the first musicians to play a free concert in the organization’s Atrium space.That civic impetus is familiar to Charles’s former Juilliard roommate Diehl — a pianist who has also memorably collaborated with the New York Philharmonic. In a phone interview, Diehl remembered fondly Charles’s way of schooling him on the connections between Caribbean traditions and American jazz.“Spending time with him really revealed an entire world of Afro-diasporic music that I hadn’t even encountered,” Diehl said. “He will be very quick to tell you if you’re not playing one of those grooves correctly.”For the Oct. 8 performances, “San Juan Hill” will open with a mini-set by Creole Soul. While the group plays, images of the neighborhood, past and present, will be projected inside Geffen Hall. But the bulk of the piece involves the Philharmonic players and their music director, Jaap van Zweden, in dialogue with Creole Soul. Then, the images will be projected only between movements. (The multimedia aspects involve film elements directed by Maya Cozier, graffiti by the visual artist Gary Fritz (known as Wicked GF), and 3-D imagery by Bayeté Ross Smith.)The movements with the Philharmonic — there are five, representing about 55 minutes of the 75-minute performance — feature a wealth of American musical textures, from vintage stride piano to modern hip-hop.Charles: “I also wanted to channel the sounds of the immigrants. I’m from Trinidad; there was a significant number of English-speaking Caribbean people in this neighborhood — so I had to channel Calypso.”Josefina Santos for The New York Times“A lot of it is heavily influenced by what James P. Johnson was doing, what Fats Waller was doing,” Charles said. “And then I also wanted to channel the sounds of the immigrants. I’m from Trinidad; there was a significant number of English-speaking Caribbean people in this neighborhood — so I had to channel Calypso.”The historical record is also fodder for Charles’s musical imagination. The first movement with the orchestra, titled “Riot 1905,” refers to one of those infamous street altercations in San Juan Hill. That front-page story in The Times, from July 1905, had to do with a race riot that broke out when a Black man stepped in to assist a local ragman who needed help making his way through the neighborhood.But toward the end of “Riot 1905,” a rhythmic indication in the score name-checks the work of the hip-hop producer J Dilla, who died in 2006. It’s a playful fillip — and perhaps anachronistic, at first glance. But for Charles, it’s a way to draw a parallel between eras, since “people are still dealing with senseless acts of violence.”A movement for his group and the orchestra, “Negro Enchantress,” paints a portrait of Hannah Elias — at one point a courtesan and, later in life, a landlord and property owner and one of the richest Black women in New York City.Around the turn of the 20th century, Elias received hundreds of thousands of dollars in gifts from a lover, John R. Platt, a white man. “I don’t know if you want to call it like an 1895 version of ‘The Tinder Swindler,’” Charles said. “But he sued her. And they put it all in the papers. She had a mansion on Central Park West. Seven-bedroom mansion! And this whole mob showed up outside her house. She won the lawsuit; he lost the lawsuit. She bought property all over New York.”The music of this movement begins softly and seductively, before taking on a suspenseful tinge. “It gets really out,” Charles said. “It’s like Jekyll and Hyde. You thought this person was one thing — but it’s also really that you’ve been convinced by your family that you shouldn’t be giving this person money.”The third and fourth movements — “Charleston at the Jungles” and “Urban Removal” — address the sharply divergent legacies of the pianist James P. Johnson and Robert Moses. But Charles didn’t want to end the piece on a downer, so the final movement for the orchestra, “House Rent Party,” is a delirious fusion of ragtime, Afro-Venezuelan waltzes and turntablism.“What is it like being a DJ in a party with people from everywhere?” Charles asked, rhetorically, after I pointed to the profusion of styles in this portion of the score. “You’ve got to give them a little taste.” 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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      Classical Music Has a Hazy Future in Lincoln Center’s Summers

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      The day had been hot and muggy. But a mild breeze was blowing at Lincoln Center by the time the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra took the stage in Damrosch Park on Tuesday evening.The pianist Conrad Tao played an elegantly unruffled Mozart concerto and a daydreamy “Rhapsody in Blue.” Apart from a sprinkling of small performances last summer, this orchestra hadn’t been assembled since 2019, but it sounded comfortable and spirited.In just three years, the group has become an anachronism. The festival whose name it bears — Lincoln Center’s premier summertime event before the pandemic — is no more. The center’s summer, once a messy assortment of competing series and festivals, has finally been streamlined under a single label: “Summer for the City.”Planned by Lincoln Center’s president, Henry Timms, and its artistic chief since last year, Shanta Thake, Summer for the City has hoisted a 10-foot disco ball over the plaza fountain and includes outdoor film screenings, spoken word, social dance, comedy shows and an ASL version of “Sweeney Todd.”Five of New York’s dance companies will come together next month for a few days of performances. And starting on Friday, the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra moves inside to Alice Tully Hall for five programs: 10 concerts over two weeks.Louis Langrée, the orchestra’s music director since 2002, led the performance on Tuesday.Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesBut despite that packed little orchestral season, other musical experiences that once appeared under the Mostly Mozart rubric have vanished along with the name — including guest ensembles, intimate recitals, and the new music that flows out of the classical tradition and is embodied by the International Contemporary Ensemble, long in residence at the festival but absent this year.Up in the air is the ultimate fate of the Mostly Mozart orchestra, a high-quality, carefully built and expensive group whose music director, Louis Langrée, has been on its podium since 2002. Though Thake told the orchestra on Friday that it would be a part of the summer next year, things get hazier beyond that. And while her vision for the season is still developing, this first iteration seems to have intentionally moved away from swaths of music and performance that have been central to the center’s identity for decades.Which is not to say that Lincoln Center’s summers have been just one thing. As Joseph W. Polisi, a longtime president of the Juilliard School, describes in “Beacon to the World: A History of Lincoln Center,” recently published by Yale University Press, the initial thought was that the center’s own programming would happen primarily in the summertime, so as not to compete in fall and spring with the constituent organizations for which it serves as a landlord, like the Metropolitan Opera and New York Philharmonic.As the campus was being conceived, summer was imagined to be a good time for folk-ish operas and musicals, like “Oklahoma!” or Copland’s “The Tender Land,” or perhaps a film festival; it’s in the DNA for the center’s summer offerings to be ambitious but accessible, populist but serious.The pianist Conrad Tao was the soloist in several works on the program, including a Mozart concerto and “Rhapsody in Blue.”Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesThe flutist Jasmine Choi played in William Grant Still’s “Out of the Silence.”Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesThough Summer for the City is taking place largely outdoors, the novelty in those early years was being inside: Midsummer Serenades — A Mozart Festival, which started in 1966 and was renamed Mostly Mozart six years later, was the first festival in New York to take place in an air-conditioned hall.The campus’s Community/Street Theater Festival of the early 1970s morphed, a few years later, into Lincoln Center Out of Doors, a free, outdoor, eclectic mélange: Ballet Hispánico and bluegrass, string quartets and a doo-wop opera, and eventually a helping of social dance as Midsummer Night’s Swing.Mostly Mozart grew to be perceived as stodgy and listless in this company. When Jane Moss — like Thake, a hire from outside classical music — became the center’s artistic leader in the early 1990s, it was believed that part of her brief was to eliminate it. After the Lincoln Center Festival, which hosted ambitious international touring productions, was founded in the mid-90s, Mostly Mozart, which had once lasted up to nine weeks, dwindled from seven to four. A musicians’ strike in 2002 was another existential crisis.But instead of spiking Mostly Mozart, Moss took a firmer hand with the programming, hired Langrée as a partner, and broadened the offerings — eventually to something closer to Slightly Mozart. In 2017, amid budget and management crises, the Lincoln Center Festival folded and Mostly Mozart was set to expand by up to 50 percent to partly compensate. The festival orchestra entered the opera pit for the first time in 2019; there were dance theater productions and the lauded New York premiere of “The Black Clown”; Langrée’s contract was renewed through 2023.During the center’s pandemic silence in 2020, though, Moss decided to step down. And here we are: Mostly Mozart, instead of being expanded, has been eliminated.In a joint interview with Timms, Thake said that this year’s Summer for the City should not necessarily be seen as the model for all to come. “It’s definitely a unique moment,” she said. “We’re coming out of a two-year pandemic. This is our first full expression of what is possible.”Starting on Friday, the orchestra moves inside to Alice Tully Hall for five programs: 10 concerts over two weeks.Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesReferring to the center’s Restart Stages initiative from 2021, she added: “There had been some proven success in experimentation. What you’re seeing this year is a continued explosion of form, and putting it all under one umbrella.”Summer for the City has the spunky feel of Joe’s Pub, the cabaret space that Thake ran, along with other Public Theater initiatives like Under the Radar and Public Works, before she was hired by Lincoln Center. It also feels like a throwback to the Community/Street Theater Festival and Out of Doors tradition from the early ’70s.That can yield wonderful programming, and much civic good. Growing up just outside the city, I found Midsummer Night’s Swing — with its tango-ing, salsa-ing crowd — exciting and glamorous, the definition of a New York summer night.But those offerings existed in an ecosystem in which classical music — broadly construed as far as style, period and form — was another pillar, not a fringe.Thake insisted in the interview that classical programming has found its way into Summer for the City in more varied, informal ways: as an accompaniment to blood drives and a mass wedding ceremony, and in the form of music-and-meditation sessions in the David Rubenstein Atrium.Timms added: “In terms of volume, probably, the amount of classical music being presented hasn’t changed much. The nature of it has changed, to some degree, though not fundamentally.”Uh-huh.The two leaders implied that the reconception of the summer is pulling the center more toward the role of host, welcoming as many people as it can onto campus, while the constituent organizations handle or at least share the presenting — especially in the classical sphere. The idea, for example, is that the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s small set of Summer Evenings concerts can basically take care of what was once Mostly Mozart’s cozy A Little Night Music series, as well as its other solo and chamber events.Other musical experiences that once appeared under the Mostly Mozart rubric have vanished along with the name — including guest ensembles, intimate recitals and new music.Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesThe danger, of course, is that in reducing redundancies and internal competition, the city simply ends up with less.It’s true that the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra’s compressed season — which began with a week of mentoring and performing alongside student musicians — promises to showcase talented young guest artists. On Aug. 5 and 6, Langrée leads Mozart’s Requiem, a few days before Jlin’s arrangement of that work is the score for Kyle Abraham’s recent dance “Requiem: Fire in the Air of the Earth” — the kind of artistic cross-pollination that should be the center’s stock in trade.Even more important, the orchestra’s Tully concerts are choose-what-you-pay, a ticketing philosophy that should be a model for the center’s whole year. A range of excellent music, painstakingly prepared and performed at the highest level for affordable prices: That is true populism.Instead, classical music, even in its ever-struggling nonprofit form, gets cast as the elitist hegemon for which scrappier alternatives must be found — certainly if much-vaunted “new audiences” are going to be attracted.But classical programming should not be considered a chore, or a bone thrown to a dwindling audience — a familiar one rather than “new.” No, serious performance is a jewel, of which Lincoln Center is one of the few remaining supreme presenters. Conrad Tao playing Mozart with a superb orchestra for free or cheap: That is the core of the center’s mission. Its job is to cultivate audiences for and increase access to that.Which is not to say that change is impossible. Is a resident orchestra with an appointed music director the only way to fulfill Lincoln Center’s mission? Perhaps not. But is there a way of programming such an orchestra so that it could be an integral part of a diverse, adventurous summer season? Yes. Could it be joined to opera, recitals, new music and guest ensembles in broadening what I think Timms and Thake are trying to do: to foster inexpensive interactions with great performance? Absolutely.“We’re still getting our feet under us,” Thake said. “And seeing again, how can we continue to be responsive? How can we move through this season and get a sense of what worked, what didn’t work, what’s next for all of us?” More

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      Lincoln Center Announces ‘Summer for the City’ Festival

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      A festival, Summer for the City, which includes elements of Mostly Mozart, is part of an effort to attract younger, more diverse audiences.After more than two years of upheaval brought on by the coronavirus pandemic, Lincoln Center will stage a festival this summer aimed at helping New York City heal.Called Summer for the City, the festival will take place across 10 outdoor spaces and three indoor stages at the campus from mid-May to mid-August and will be programmed around themes of rejoicing, reclaiming and remembering. It is also part of Lincoln Center’s efforts to recalibrate its image as an exclusive bastion of classical music and appeal to a younger, more diverse crowd.The center plans to feature more popular music and install a large disco ball, 10 feet in diameter, that will hang over a dance floor at the center’s main plaza.“My hope is that we’re making space for people to find their neighbors again, to find each other again and to find their own inner performer,” Shanta Thake, the center’s chief artistic officer, said in an interview. “And to really be in their whole body with other New Yorkers and come back together again as a city.”The festival, which is expected to include over 300 events and 1,000 artists, is the first under Thake, who joined Lincoln Center last year with a mission of broadening its appeal beyond classical music and ballet into genres like hip-hop, poetry and songwriting.This year’s programming will open with a mass singalong on the Josie Robertson Plaza, featuring the Young People’s Chorus of New York, under the direction of Elizabeth Núñez, and including classics like “This Little Light of Mine” and Elton John’s “Your Song.”In August, two versions of Mozart’s Requiem will be on offer — a traditionally presented one, by the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, and a reimagined dance version, “Requiem: Fire in the Air of the Earth,” choreographed by Kyle Abraham and performed by his company, A.I.M, featuring the electronic musician Jlin.Summer in the City will unite the center’s festivals — including the discontinued Lincoln Center Festival and the Mostly Mozart Festival, which has largely been put on hold since 2020.The Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra will perform six pairs of concerts this summer, including a free opening program in July under the ensemble’s longtime music director, Louis Langrée, with Conrad Tao as the soloist in Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 17 in G and Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” (Tao will also play the William Grant Still solo “Out of the Silence” from “Seven Traceries.”)Thake, a former associate artistic director at the Public Theater, where she spent a decade managing the cabaret-style venue Joe’s Pub, said that she hoped to broaden the audience for Mostly Mozart by integrating it with Lincoln Center’s other summer offerings.“What we’re experimenting with this year is really the breaking down of our internal silos,” she said. “They’re all under the same banner, and this is one Lincoln Center audience that is very broad, and we’re going to see how that works.”Summer for the City aims to build on Restart Stages last year, when the center hosted small-scale performances outdoors, to help get artists back to work after months of pandemic cancellations. According to Lincoln Center, that series attracted more than 200,000 people, nearly a quarter of whom were first-time visitors.The disco ball is the centerpiece of the Oasis, an outdoor stage designed by the costume and set designer Clint Ramos, that will host live music and dance parties throughout the summer.In June, Jazz at Lincoln Center, embracing a New Orleans tradition, will lead a second-line processional from Columbus Circle to Lincoln Center, to mourn those who have died since the pandemic started. And in July, the center will host “Celebrate LOVE: A (Re)Wedding,” as a ceremony for couples who canceled or scaled back nuptials in the past two years, with live music and a reception on the dance floor.The arts, Thake said, “speak to all of the deep trauma that we’ve all collectively been through and also bring so much of the joy and revitalization that the city needs.” More

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      Lincoln Center Names Shanta Thake as its New Artistic Leader

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      Shanta Thake, a theater executive, faces challenges that include helping the center embrace new genres and attract virus-wary audiences.Feeling the pressure to attract new audiences and rethink its offerings even before being upended by the coronavirus pandemic, Lincoln Center announced on Tuesday that it had chosen a theater executive with a reputation for working across disciplines as its next artistic leader.Shanta Thake, most recently an associate artistic director at the Public Theater, will assume the role of chief artistic officer at the center, the nation’s largest performing arts complex, as it works to broaden its appeal beyond classical music and ballet into genres such as hip-hop, poetry and songwriting.Thake — who at the Public spent a decade managing Joe’s Pub, a cabaret-style venue, and more recently began overseeing Under the Radar, Public Works and other programs there — said she was eager to bring more popular and world music to Lincoln Center.“The goal is expansive reach,” Thake, 41, said in an interview. “What’s missing? What have we left out? What stories aren’t we telling that feel like they’re demanding to be told in this moment?”Lincoln Center is the landlord of the Metropolitan Opera, New York Philharmonic, New York City Ballet and other independent institutions, which are responsible for their own programming. But it is also a presenting organization in its own right, putting on hundreds of events each year and running the Mostly Mozart and White Light festivals, which have been primarily devoted to the classical arts. The center and its constituent organizations have competed, sometimes tensely, for rehearsal and performance space, ticket sales and donations.Thake will oversee the work Lincoln Center presents, and said in the interview that its robust classical offerings would be maintained. “We’re not looking to erase history here,” she said.But center officials say they are still working out the future of Mostly Mozart, which was put on hold amid the pandemic, other than a few small events this week. In 2017, as it grappled with budgetary constraints, the center dissolved the Lincoln Center Festival to focus on reinventing Mostly Mozart, its summertime sibling.Thake, who starts next month, replaces Jane Moss, who played a key role in programming for nearly three decades and stepped down as artistic director last year — and who also came from a theater background. (The chief artistic officer title is a new one.) Thake joins the center at one of the most challenging moments since it opened in 1962. Its woes predate the coronavirus: It struggled for years from leadership churn and money problems.Then the pandemic wiped away tens of millions in revenue and forced the cancellation of hundreds of events. About half of Lincoln Center’s staff of 400 was furloughed or laid off, and its top leaders took pay cuts.While many workers have been rehired and indoor performances are set to resume in the fall, the center will likely be grappling with the financial fallout for years. It remains to be seen whether audiences will return at prepandemic levels, especially given the recent spread of the Delta variant of the virus.Henry Timms, Lincoln Center’s president and chief executive, said the organization had turned to Thake for her experience programming creatively across genres. “We wanted someone who could kind of help us think about some new territory,” he said.Timms said the virus would continue to pose a challenge for the center’s artistic ambitions, but added that he believed audiences were eager to return. “There will be a great deal of demand for what we do and there will be a great deal of re-imagination,” he said.As infections have eased in recent months and vaccines have become widely available, Lincoln Center has started to come back to life, building several outdoor stages and transforming its plaza into a summer gathering place by covering it in a synthetic lawn. When indoor performances resume, the center plans to require vaccines for audience members, production staff and artists. Children under 12 will not be permitted to attend performances since they are currently not eligible for vaccines.Thake said she saw her mission as, in part, to “lift up the city that is still reeling from the ongoing trauma” of the pandemic. She said Lincoln Center could play a role in helping smaller arts organizations, for example by sharing best practices for reopening venues.“Hopefully we can make it to the other side all together,” she said.Thake, whose mother is Indian and whose father is white, said she was committed to presenting artists who represent a variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds. Cultural institutions have in general been slow to respond to demands for a reckoning over racial justice in the United States. But Lincoln Center is one of the few arts organizations to show substantial progress in bringing more diversity to its upper ranks. People of color now make up about half of its leadership team. More