In Sunday’s (4/26) Los Angeles Times, Mark Swed writes about changes at New York’s Mostly Mozart Festival and Great Performers series since 1992, when “Lincoln Center hired Jane Moss as vice president of programming [and where she] now holds the position of artistic director…. What’s changed is that Mostly Mozart, where Mozart mashes with the new, has become maybe the hippest summer music festival in America.… One of Moss’ early novelties was a New Visions series, including what was in 2001 controversial and is now a legend: Lorraine Hunt Lieberson’s shockingly moving performances of Bach cantatas staged by [Peter] Sellars … She also created an enduring connection between Mozart and the audience, making the plucky Brooklyn-based International Contemporary Ensemble a regular part of the mix. Next year she will celebrate the 50th anniversary of Mostly Mozart by commissioning 50 composers to write short pieces for ICE.… ‘I think that live performance is going to be the most avant-garde aspect of our lives if these devices keep making inroads into how people are relating to the world,’ [Moss] says. ‘It may become the one place left for people to have a collective experience.’ ”
Posted April 27, 2015
