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By Matthew Westphal
and Ben Mattison
01 Aug 2006
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| Wolfgang Amadé Mozart and Louis Langrée |
It's a big year for the Mostly Mozart Festival: the 40th anniversary of Lincoln Center's summer concert series itself and the 250th anniversary of its namesake composer's birth. And the festival is getting a suitably majestic launch this evening, as Langrée conducts the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra and the Concert Chorale of New York in a gala performance of the "Coronation" Concerto (featuring pianist Garrick Ohlsson) and the "Coronation" Mass (with soloists Hei-Kyung Hong, Susanne Mentzer, Matthew Polenzani and John Relyea).
That same program will be repeated tomorrow — and broadcast live nationwide on PBS's Live From Lincoln Center at tomorrow night at 8 pm Eastern time (check local listings).
For the second year in a row, Avery Fisher Hall will be reconfigured for Mostly Mozart. As in 2005, the stage will be extended into the audience, seating will be placed behind the orchestra, and an acoustic canopy containing lighting will be placed over the stage.
Among other highlights of this year's Mostly Mozart Festival:
• The world premiere run of a new work commissioned by the festival from choreographer Mark Morris, Mozart Dances. In the pit will be Langrée, the Festival Orchestra and piano soloists Emanuel Ax and Yoko Nozaki (August 17-19).
• A new production by director Peter Sellars of Mozart's unfinished opera Zaïde, with Langrée conducting the German period-instrument orchestra Concerto Köln (August 9-12).
• Another Festival commission in its world premiere: a violin concerto by Finnish composer Magnus Lindberg — performed by Lisa Batiashvili, whom Gramophone magazine just named one of the 20 "Classical Superstars of the Future" (August 22-23).
• The New York debut of acclaimed young violinist Sergey Khachatryan, winner of the 2005 Queen Elisabeth International Music Competition in Brussels, playing Beethoven's Violin Concerto with Osmo Vänskä, Musical America's 2004 Conductor of the Year (August 4-5).
• Gidon Kremer and his chamber orchestra Kremerata Baltica performing all of Mozart's Violin Concertos (August 6-7).
• The Tallis Scholars in a program of late Renaissance and early German Baroque sacred music titled "From Dresden to Innsbruck (and Back)" (Aug. 16).
• Joshua Bell and Friends (including pianist Frederic Chiu and the Miró Quartet) (Aug. 20).
• The Emerson String Quartet, with colleagues including violinist Jaime Laredo and (now two-handed) pianist Leon Fleisher (Aug. 24).
• William Christie and Les Arts Florissants in a semi-staged performance of Mozart's opera Idomeneo starring Paul Agnew, Tuva Semmingsen and Claire Debono (Aug. 23 and 25).
• The Mostly Mozart grand finale: Langrée conducting the Festival Orchestra in Mozart's final three symphonies (Aug. 25-26).
One of Mostly Mozart's best recent innovations is back this year: "A Little Night Music" — 10:30 pm concerts in the intimate Kaplan Penthouse. This year's late-night offerings include, among others, Gidon Kremer (Aug. 5), Christian Zacharias (Aug. 10) and Emanuel Ax (Aug. 15). In perhaps the most exotic of this year's offerings, Concerto Köln joins the ensemble Sarband for two "Little Night" programs juxtaposing the "alla turca" style of Mozart and his contemporaries with actual Turkish Ottoman music (August 11-12).
Mostly Mozart's commissions for this year's festival extend even to visual art. Throughout the festival, on the outward-facing columns of Avery Fisher Hall's façade, there will be a digital art installation called Enlightenment created especially for the occasion by the three-man collective called the OpenEnded Group. The artwork (see images below) will track the progress, through graphics and sound, of a powerful computer program as it repeatedly breaks down the coda of Mozart's "Jupiter" Symphony into its constituent elements, analyzes the relationships between its various themes, and reassembles it. Of Enlightenment, Mostly Mozart artistic director Jane Moss said earlier this year, "I have never fallen so deeply in love with an idea that I in no way understand."
Information about and tickets for the 2006 Mostly Mozart Festival are available at www.lincolncenter.org.
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| Images from the OpenEnded Group's digital artwork Enlightenment, along with a diagram showing the piece's location on the columns of Avery Fisher Hall's façade.
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