The day had been hot and stuffy. But by the time the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra took the stage in Damrosch Park on Tuesday night, a gentle breeze was blowing into Lincoln Center.
The pianist Conrad Tao played an elegantly imperturbable Mozart concerto and a daydreaming “Rhapsody in Blue”. Apart from a few small performances last summer, this orchestra hadn’t gathered since 2019, but it sounded cozy and lively.
In just three years, the group has become an anachronism. The festival it bears the name — Lincoln Center’s main summer event before the pandemic — no longer exists. Once a cluttered assortment of competing series and festivals, Summer of the Center has finally been streamlined under a single label: ‘Summer for the City’.
Summer for the City is planned by Lincoln Center president Henry Timms and last year’s artistic director Shanta Thake. and an ASL version of “Sweeney Todd.”
Five of New York’s dance companies are getting together for a few days of performances next month. And from Friday, the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra moves to Alice Tully Hall for five programmes: 10 concerts spread over two weeks.
But despite that overcrowded small orchestra season, other musical experiences that once appeared under the Mostly Mozart rubric have disappeared along with the name—including guest ensembles, intimate recitals, and the new music that stems from the classical tradition and is embodied by the International Contemporary Ensemble, long in residence at the festival but absent this year.
In the air hangs the ultimate fate of the Mostly Mozart Orchestra, a high-quality, carefully constructed and expensive group whose music director, Louis Langrée, has been on stage since 2002. Although Thake told the orchestra on Friday it would be part of the summer next year, things get blurrier after that. And while her vision for the season is still evolving, this first iteration seems to have deliberately moved away from parts of music and performance that have been central to the center’s identity for decades.
Which isn’t to say that Lincoln Center’s summers were 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,” published recently by Yale University Press, the initial thought was that the center’s own programming was primarily in summer time, so as not to compete in the fall and spring with the organizations it hosts, such as the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic.
When the campus was designed, it was thought that summer would be a good time for folk-style operas and musicals, such as “Oklahoma!” or Copland’s “The Tender Land”, or maybe a film festival; it’s in the DNA for the center’s summer offerings to be ambitious but accessible, populist but serious.
Although Summer for the City largely takes place outdoors, the novelty in those early years was: inside: Midsummer Serenades — A Mozart festival, which began in 1966 and was renamed Mostly Mozart six years later, was the first festival in New York to take place in an air-conditioned venue.
The Community/Street Theater Festival of the early 1970s turned into Lincoln Center Out of Doors a few years later, a free, open-air, eclectic melange: Hispánico ballet and bluegrass, string quartets and a doo-wop opera, and finally a helping of social dance like Midsummer Night’s Swing.
Most often Mozart in this company was seen as stodgy and listless. When Jane Moss — like Thake, a collaborator from outside of classical music — became the center’s artistic director in the early 1990s, it was believed part of her job was to eliminate it. After the Lincoln Center Festival was established in the mid-1990s, hosting ambitious international tour productions, Mostly Mozart, which once lasted nine weeks, went from seven to four. A musicians’ strike in 2002 was another existential crisis.
But instead of beating Mostly Mozart, Moss took a firmer hand at programming, hired Langrée as a partner and expanded the offering — eventually to something closer to Slightly Mozart. In 2017, amid budget and management crises, the Lincoln Center Festival fell silent and Mostly Mozart would expand to 50 percent to partially compensate. The festival orchestra entered the opera pit for the first time in 2019; there were dance theater productions and the acclaimed New York premiere of “The Black Clown”; Langrée’s contract was extended until 2023.
However, during the center’s pandemic lull in 2020, Moss decided to resign. And here we are: Mostly, rather than extensively, Mozart has been eliminated.
In a joint interview with Timms, Thake said this year’s Summer for the City shouldn’t necessarily be seen as a model for everyone. “It’s definitely a unique moment,” she said. “We are coming out of a two-year pandemic. This is our first full expression of what is possible.”
Referring to the center’s 2021 Restart Stages initiative, she added: “There was some proven success in the experimentation. What you’re seeing this year is an ongoing explosion of form, all under one umbrella.”
Summer for the City has the spirited feel of Joe’s Pub, the cabaret space that Thake ran, along with other Public Theater initiatives such as Under the Radar and Public Works, before being adopted by Lincoln Center. It also feels like a return to the Community/Street Theater Festival and the Out of Doors tradition of the early 1970s.
That can result in wonderful programming, and a lot of good for society. Growing up just outside the city, I found Midsummer Night’s Swing—with its tango, salsa-ing crowd—exciting and glamorous, the definition of a summer night in New York.
But that offer existed in an ecosystem in which classical music – broadly understood as style, period and form – was another pillar, not an edge.
Thake emphasized in the interview that classical programming has made its way into Summer for the City in more varied, informal ways: as an accompaniment to blood donations 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, the amount of classical music presented probably hasn’t changed much. Its nature has changed to some extent, but not fundamentally.”
Uh Huh.
The two leaders suggested that the summer redesign draws the center more into the role of host, welcoming as many people as possible to campus, while the constituent organizations deliver or at least share the presentation — especially in the classical atmosphere. For example, the idea is that the small number of Summer Evenings concerts from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center could in fact provide what was once Mostly Mozart’s cozy A Little Night Music series, as well as the other solo and chamber events.
The danger, of course, is that by reducing layoffs and internal competition, the city will simply be left with less.
It is true that the compressed season of the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra – which started with a week of mentorship and performances with student musicians – promises to showcase talented young guest artists. On August 5 and 6, Langrée will conduct Mozart’s Requiem, a few days before Jlin’s adaptation of that work, 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 from the center.
More importantly, the orchestra’s Tully concerts are pick-what-you-pay, a ticketing philosophy that should model the center all year round. A range of excellent music, meticulously prepared and performed at the highest level at affordable prices: that is true populism.
Instead, classical music, even in its always struggling non-profit form, is cast as the elite hegemon for which inferior alternatives must be found – especially if it will attract the much-vaunted ‘new audience’.
But classic programming shouldn’t be viewed as a chore, or a bot tossed to a dwindling audience — familiar rather than “new.” No, serious acting is a jewel, of which Lincoln Center is one of the few surviving supreme presenters. Conrad Tao plays Mozart with a fantastic orchestra, free or cheap: that is the core of the mission of the center. Its job is to cultivate an audience for and access to That.
That is not to say that change is impossible. Is a resident orchestra with an appointed conductor the only way to fulfill Lincoln Center’s mission? Maybe not. But is there a way to program such an orchestra to be an integral part of a diverse, adventurous summer season? Yes. Could it be combined with opera, recitals, new music, and guest ensembles to broaden what I think Timms and Thake are trying to do: promote cheap interactions with great performances? Absolute.
“We’re still getting our feet under us,” Thake said. “And again, how can we continue to respond? How can we get through this season and get a sense of what worked, what didn’t, what’s next for all of us?”