While summer is the doldrums of the city’s classical music scene, with the Philharmonic having packed up their tubas and Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan Opera House largely dark, the Mostly Mozart festival blows into town in late July like a breath of Austrian alpine air.
In its 51st year, the festival opens July 25 with a rarely performed early choral Kyrie by Wolfgang, featuring the Young People’s Chorus of New York City, and concludes Aug. 20 with “Don Giovanni,” Mozart’s operatic take on Don Juan that ends with the lothario consigned to the hellfires below.
The “Giovanni” production is sure to be a highlight, as it reprises the 2011 performance by Iván Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra. Given Fischer’s reputation, however, it is highly unlikely that he will simply stage the identical production he did six years ago. He continually seeks to enhance or re-imagine the concert experience and involve the audience in new ways, whether by placing beanbags throughout the orchestra for audience members to sit on, or by seating choristers in the audience during Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony so they can stand and sing the concluding “Ode to Joy” throughout the hall.
Another eagerly anticipated event is the staged production of Hans Zender’s orchestral arrangement of Franz Schubert’s “Winterreise,” which tells of a young man wandering through the winter, questioning his identity and the meaning of life. The staging is to evoke the everything-goes Weimar-era in Germany. Tenor Ian Bostridge, a renowned interpreter of the song cycle, called them “forerunners, in a sense, of all those songs of love and loss that have been the soundtrack of generation on generation of teenagers” in a 2015 Guardian article.
Along with Mozart, you’ll find Bach, Beethoven, Brahms and other big names represented. And as with any major festival, there are a handful of star soloists, including violinist Joshua Bell playing Brahms Double Concerto and pianist Kirill Gerstein, playing Schumann’s Piano Concerto and an intriguing late-night recital of works by Brahms and his beloved Clara Schumann.
Of the premieres, Anna Thorvaldsdottir, a star Icelandic composer of sonorous atmospheric music (think spare Sigur Rós with no vocals), debut’s “Aequilibria” to U.S. audiences, and the pianist Beatrice Rana makes her NYC debut playing Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto. The young Italian won the silver medal at the 2013 Van Cliburn piano competition, and while her technique is excellent and her touch light, she is almost an anachronism in an era of hyper-precise young technicians, many of whom are flashy, both at the keyboard and in their dress.
If you go
Mostly Mozart runs from July 25-Aug. 20 at Lincoln Center. For a full schedule of shows, locations, times and ticket information, go to lincolncenter.org/mostly-mozart
