“Looking back, it’s clear that Jane Moss, the artistic director of Lincoln Center, made a smart move in appointing Louis Langrée as music director of the Mostly Mozart Festival in 2002,” writes Anthony Tommasini in Monday’s (8/21) New York Times. “The festival introduced several welcome innovations: creating a residency for the International Contemporary Ensemble, a crack new-music group; starting a popular series of late-night recitals at the intimate Kaplan Penthouse; even presenting ambitious opera productions…. This summer … the season … opened in July with a program titled ‘The Singing Heart.’ … In between movements of Mozart’s ‘Haffner’ Symphony, conducted by Mr. Langrée, the inspiring Young People’s Chorus of New York City sang folk songs and spirituals.… In early August, So Percussion [quartet] joined the orchestra for the premiere of a new arrangement of David Lang’s ‘man made,’ a percussion concerto [that] calls for the soloists to play … wine bottles, twigs and trash cans. Mr. Langrée chose older works by Mozart and Lully that … incorporate, for their time, exotic percussion instruments, including cymbals, triangle and tambourines to evoke Turkish locales. Afterward, So Percussion reassembled at the Kaplan Penthouse for … an engrossing and entertaining program of wildly inventive pieces by John Cage, Caroline Shaw and Viet Cuong.”
Posted August 24, 2017
