“This summer, Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival will be awash in the music of Igor Stravinsky,” writes Stuart Isacoff in Thursday’s (8/4) Wall Street Journal. “Why Stravinsky at a Mozart event? One likely reason is his so-called neoclassical period, though as conductor Pablo Heras-Casado, who will be leading several of the festival’s offerings, notes … Much of this music ‘actually has little to do with the Classical period.’ … Of course, in some ways Mozart and Stravinsky were alike: Both were daring musical pioneers, and both were intensely interested in dramatic narrative…. Their aesthetic aims were another matter. … From the time he left his beloved homeland for the bright lights of Paris, unable to return after the outbreak of World War I … [Stravinsky] seemed to be searching for a sense of place. … ‘What fascinates me most is our inability to place him,’ agrees flutist Claire Chase, executive director of the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), a group that will be performing in the series. Add to that the composer’s modern proclivity for pushing the envelope on virtuosity, and you encounter real challenges. ‘In Mozart,’ she says, ‘you have to let the instrument be the instrument. In Stravinsky, you have to attack the instrument.’ ”
Posted August 5, 2011
