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Musical summers in New York may never have been as rich as they were in the first two decades of the current century, when the Mostly Mozart Festival, under the leadership of Jane Moss, and the Lincoln Center Festival, under Nigel Redden, vied with each other in the conjuring of lavishly varied seasons. In and around the Lincoln Center complex you encountered not only the usual array of Mozart symphonies and concertos, which had been attracting steady crowds since 1966, but also Baroque music-and-dance spectacles by Mark Morris; orchestral cycles of Bruckner and Varèse; Wagner’s sixteen-hour “Ring”; Chen Shi-Zheng’s nineteen-hour “Peony Pavilion”; Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s apocalyptic antiwar opera, “Die Soldaten”; Davóne Tines and Michael Schachter’s apocalyptic anti-racist revue, “The Black Clown”; and avant-garde evenings of Pauline Oliveros and Kaija Saariaho, not to mention Persian ritual theatre, Georgian polyphony, Noh dramas, and Thai rock.
Those days are gone. The Lincoln Center Festival shut down in 2017; Mostly Mozart finished expiring this month. Lincoln Center’s programming division, which is distinct from the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Philharmonic, New York City Ballet, and other resident organizations, is concentrating its energies on a series called “Summer for the City.” A press release describes the range of offerings: a celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of hip-hop; the Criminal Queerness Festival; a series called “Cultivating Access Ecologies”; Korean Arts Week; “social sculpture interventions”; “participatory movement and mindfulness sessions”; Big Umbrella Day, geared toward neurodiverse audiences; standup comedy; games spaces; silent discos, with revellers wearing headphones; and “the world’s first LGBTQIA+ mariachi group.” The farewell season of the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, which once played for seven weeks or more a year, consisted of thirteen concerts in the course of three weeks.
The thinking behind this change in direction is clear enough. Lincoln Center, with its aloof modernist façades, projected a domineering cultural image from the outset. The fact that its construction required the razing of San Juan Hill—a largely Puerto Rican, Afro-Caribbean, and African American neighborhood—gave an indication of the kind of audience that was preferred. The institution had never reckoned with its history in any significant way, and the team that has assumed control in the past several years—led by Henry Timms, Lincoln Center’s president and chief executive, and Shanta Thake, its chief artistic officer—has resolved to bring in new voices and genres. Thake said to the Times, “What have we left out? What stories aren’t we telling that feel like they’re demanding to be told in this moment?”
Those are necessary questions, yet the answers have so far been confusing. The pop programming defies the natural capabilities of its primary buildings, which include an opera house, an orchestra hall, a chamber-music hall, and a ballet theatre. Unless all these buildings are torn down and replaced by a stadium, Lincoln Center will always be best suited to events of the sit-down-and-listen variety. Furthermore, with Carnegie Hall on its annual pause after June, David Geffen Hall is the city’s only first-rate venue for orchestral music in the summer. It’s especially bizarre that Lincoln Center has put together so few classical events this past year, following Geffen’s reopening after an extensive renovation. The audience is out there: the final two Mostly Mozart concerts were packed.
Although the traditional performing arts have abiding issues with élitism and exclusivity, a swerve toward pop hardly compensates for the profound societal inequalities that are embedded in our celebrity-driven culture. Symptomatic attitudes can be found in a 2018 book titled “New Power,” which Timms wrote with Jeremy Heimans. The authors reject top-down leadership and embrace a model that they call “open, participatory, and peer-driven.” Facebook and Twitter are among the lead cases. Anyone who has paid attention to the decimation of the public sphere in recent years will be aware that power tends to stay in the hands of a few, no matter what hazy rhetoric accompanies each changing of the guard.
At Lincoln Center, New Power also takes the form of sonic force: according to an app on my phone, the sound level at an outdoor dance contest approached a hundred and ten decibels. I saw elderly people wincing as they made their way, sometimes with walkers or canes, into Geffen. Lincoln Center now radiates disdain for those who wish simply to listen to music they love in a comfortable hall. I can only hope that classical programming doesn’t continue its downward spiral next summer, when the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra will return under a new name. It’s worth noting that the festival provides employment for dozens of musicians whose financial situation is considerably more precarious than that of Timms, who, according to a tax filing, received a salary of $1,469,816 in the fiscal year 2022.
Inside the hall, huge ovations greeted Louis Langrée, who served as Mostly Mozart’s impeccably stylish music director from 2002 onward. This perennially underrated Alsatian-born conductor is completing an extended period of American residency; his decade-long tenure with the Cincinnati Symphony ends next season. Those who attended Mostly Mozart during its doldrum years, in the nineteen-nineties, can attest to the wonders that Langrée worked with the ensemble: the quality of playing surged, the sense of engagement deepened. All those virtues were evident in his farewell program, which brought together Mozart’s final three symphonies. The great G-Minor Symphony had a fine-spun intensity, with flickers of rage hidden in its accents. The coda of the “Jupiter” built headlong momentum, even as each line remained thrillingly clear.
In the other program of his final week, Langrée hopped across five centuries of musical history: Lully’s “Bourgeois Gentilhomme,” the Overture from Mozart’s “Abduction from the Seraglio,” Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto (with refined solos by Randall Goosby), Kodály’s “Dances of Galánta,” and Valerie Coleman’s “Fanfare for Uncommon Times.” References along the way to Duke Ellington, Ottoman military bands, and Hungarian dance music reminded me of Langrée’s range; back in 2004, he juxtaposed Mozart’s Requiem with a performance by the Indian-Iranian trio Ghazal, which consisted of the sitarist Shujaat Husain Khan, the kamancheh player Kayhan Kalhor, and the tabla player Sandeep Das. In fact, the former team of Langrée, Moss, and Redden, far from remaining cloistered, embraced an exceptionally wide spectrum of non-Western traditions.
Langrée addressed the crowd at both concerts, with feisty enthusiasm. According to long-abiding codes of classical-music decorum, performers who are exiting an organization maintain a façade of agreeability, whether or not their departure was consensual. Langrée did not exactly adhere to the practice. In the most debonair way imaginable, he threw shade at the powers that be. He explained that he was discussing the pieces at length because “Lincoln Center decided to stop printing programs.” He alluded to the fears of orchestra members who saw “ ‘Mozart’ erased from their title.” And he pointedly analyzed Mozart’s symphonies in terms of “musical democracy” and harmonious multiplicity. He singled out a passage in the Andante of Symphony No. 39, in which a quintet of winds takes turns playing a simple pattern of four eighth-note pulses followed by a winding sixteenth-note pattern. The magic of the passage depends on five musicians listening to one another and establishing a collective flow.
Before the “Jupiter,” Langrée got to the point: “I know that now Lincoln Center wants to present much less classical music, because it’s maybe élitist, or what. But—it’s good to present hip-hop, it’s good to present R. & B., it’s good to present any type of music, any type of music, including classical music. Because—why did these pieces go through the filter of time?” After praising the orchestra, the audience, and Reynold Levy, a former president of Lincoln Center, Langrée launched into the “Jupiter,” which resoundingly answered the question he had raised.
Lincoln Center’s new leadership has implemented one excellent idea: a pay-what-you-wish plan for select summertime events, including classical concerts. The suggested ticket price is thirty-five dollars, but you can pay as little as five—practically as low as the three-dollar price that Mostly Mozart set for its first season, fifty-seven years ago. There’s a strong argument for getting back to the casual spirit of the festival’s early years, when one slogan was “Mostly Mozart, barely Bach, never neckties.” Economic conditions no longer permit the sort of grandiose international programming that prevailed in the two-thousands; what’s needed is homegrown vitality. Encouraging in this respect is the appointment of the gifted young conductor Jonathon Heyward as Langrée’s successor; a South Carolina native, he is a serious musician with a broad repertory.
For the most part, though, Timms and Thake seem fundamentally out of step with Lincoln Center and its public, both extant and potential. When people make the trip to Broadway and Sixty-fifth, they surely aren’t looking for an awkward transplantation of cultures that exist in more authentic form elsewhere in the city. They more likely want an encounter with something radically other—a world distant in time or space. The moniker Mostly Mozart worked for so long because it symbolized a longing for uncanny voyages. The festival’s time may have passed, but the longing remains. Langrée touched on that primary mission when he said, in his elegantly blunt way, that artists have a responsibility to “make our planet more beautiful.” His voice trembling slightly, he added, “I think Mozart did that for us.” ♦
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