Lincoln Center Still Has Mostly Mozart, but What Is It?

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/03/arts/music/mostly-mozart-lincoln-center.html

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Where a concert takes place can be as crucial to its success as the quality of the performance itself. So a shift of locale for a Mostly Mozart Festival concert at Lincoln Center last month proved something of a revelation, especially at a time when the center is grappling with confusion over its summer offerings.

For a traditional program of Mendelssohn and Mozart, the festival orchestra abandoned David Geffen Hall, the space it typically uses, for Alice Tully Hall. Hearing a chamber orchestra in Tully, a 1,086-seat hall built for chamber ensembles, made perfect sense. If Mozart’s “Jupiter” Symphony, which ended the program, had been played at Geffen, it would have been hard for it to stand out: Just another summer of Mostly Mozart, another “Jupiter.”

But at Tully, with Thomas Dausgaard conducting, the performance leapt off the stage. The first half of the concert also benefited. The superb Swiss pianist Francesco Piemontesi was the soloist in an elegant performance of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 27, a soft-spoken piece that tends be swallowed in Geffen-size halls. At Tully, the music’s wistful lyricism and rippling grace came through beautifully.

Why hasn’t Tully been the hall of choice for Mostly Mozart from the start? Geffen, of course, has a lot more seats (over 2,700). Most festival orchestra programs, though, don’t come close to selling out the place, while this program at Tully played to a packed and enthusiastic house.

This matters more now than ever, as Lincoln Center struggles with what to do during the summer months. For years, it offered overlapping festivals that competed for audiences and donors: Mostly Mozart, known mostly for traditional concerts; and the Lincoln Center Festival, with theater, dance and spectacle.

This summer the expensive Lincoln Center Festival was dropped. And Mostly Mozart, which in recent years has already included more elaborate projects and contemporary music, added a few theater and dance events of the kind that characterized the Lincoln Center Festival; the overall number of programs, though, has been significantly reduced.

This summer’s festival started with ambitious stagings of Leonard Bernstein’s “Mass” and Haydn’s “The Creation.” The adventurous International Contemporary Ensemble is once again in residence, though with only two programs this time. Still, with the Lincoln Center Festival gone, it’s not quite clear what Mostly Mozart stands for.

Take the concert that Louis Langrée conducted at Geffen a few days after Mr. Dausgaard’s at Tully. The program, billed as “Americans in Paris,” stretched the theme considerably to include Mozart’s Adagio and Rondo in C Minor for Glass Harmonica, Flute, Oboe, Viola and Cello. The Paris and American connections? Well, Benjamin Franklin, the first American ambassador to France, was a pioneer of the glass harmonica. And Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 17 in G was superbly performed with Emanuel Ax as soloist. But how does it fit in?

It was fun to hear a piece for glass harmonica played by two fine exponents of this unusual instrument, Friedrich Heinrich Kern and Philipp Marguerre. But these artists were showcased much more effectively later that evening on one of the festival’s popular “Little Night Music” programs at the Kaplan Penthouse. In this wonderfully intimate space (which seats around 190 people at small cocktail tables) the wonders of the modern glass harmonica, with the players rubbing wet fingers on the rims of glass-like tubes, came through affectingly. And what a pleasure to be so close to Mr. Ax during his scintillating performance of a quirky, overlooked Mozart piece, the Piano Sonata in F (K. 533).

There was a similar contrast between a vaguely defined orchestral concert at Geffen and a riveting Kaplan Penthouse event earlier this week. The orchestra’s program included a perfectly fine performance of Brahms’s Second Symphony, and the star violinist Joshua Bell brought his trademark plush sound and Romantic temperament to Bruch’s Violin Concerto No. 1. (If you missed it, you can catch him playing this chestnut, one of his well-trod favorites, in December at Carnegie Hall with the New York String Orchestra.)

But later that night at the Kaplan Penthouse, Daniel Lozakovich, a 17-year-old violinist whose career is taking off (including a recording contract with Deutsche Grammophon), made his New York debut. He began with a dark-toned, probing and dramatic account of Bach’s monumental Chaconne for solo violin. In this informal space, the performance seemed epic. The brilliant young pianist George Li joined Mr. Lozakovich for an animated account of Mozart’s Violin Sonata in B flat (K. 378), and had Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 6 in F, a jocular early work, to himself. (Mr. Lozakovich will play a Mozart concerto with the festival orchestra on Aug. 7 and 8.)

Mostly Mozart has some thinking to do. Two years ago my colleague Zachary Woolfe called upon Lincoln Center to bring its myriad summer festivals under one umbrella with a cogent program and an embracing name: he suggested Lincoln Center Summer. That imperative seems more urgent than ever.