"A Little Late-Night Music"
by Alex Ross
The New Yorker, August 29, 2005.
A decade ago, the Mostly Mozart Festival, Lincoln
Center’s venerable summertime series, was offering some of the dullest
concerts in the Western Hemisphere. I remember a performance of
Mozart’s Flute Concerto in D, with Jean-Pierre Rampal as the soloist
and Gerard Schwarz conducting the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra,
which was positively bureaucratic in its self-satisfied mediocrity, as
if it were being piped in from a department of motor vehicles in Leonid
Brezhnev’s Russia. I briefly considered abandoning music criticism for
cat-sitting.
In the mid-nineteen-nineties, with the
advent of the multidisciplinary, hipper-than-thou Lincoln Center
Festival, many people assumed that the older series would fall by the
wayside. Instead, Mostly Mozart has undergone a mildly shocking
rejuvenation. The programming now includes period-instrument ensembles,
dance (the Mark Morris Dance Group performed its masterpiece
“L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato” last week), even world music
(Kayhan Kalhor, the kamancheh virtuoso,
appeared last summer). Late-night concerts have been added, and a new
stage has been installed at Avery Fisher Hall. The orchestra, which
draws on New York’s inexhaustible supply of skilled freelancers, hasn’t
changed all that much; half the musicians on the roster were in the
group a decade ago. But they’re now playing with a youthful edge,
finding threads of novelty in some of the world’s most familiar music.
The
guiding spirit of Mostly Mozart 2.0 is Jane Moss, the Vice President for Programming at Lincoln Center, who conceived the idea of remaking the venerable summer festival. Working alongside her is Louis Langrée, who took over
from Schwarz as music director in 2002, having made his name at the
Glyndebourne Festival. An amiable-looking fellow with tousled hair,
Langrée conducts in a collarless white tunic, which makes him look
something like a celebrity chef. His style is at once warm and sharp;
he is plainly liked by the players, yet he is able to steer them out of
the eddies of harmonious routine. He has a neat way of etching the
beginnings and ends of phrases, so that Mozart’s heavenly paragraphs
don’t devolve into dulcet murmuring. In the first movement of the
“Haffner” Symphony, for example, a pattering eighth-note figure at the
end of a measure is given a marked articulation, so that it drives into
the next bar with a kind of piston action. In the same movement, upward
scales in the strings are dramatized with quick, flaring crescendos.
All through the scores, decorative details become pulses of energy,
flexings of musical muscle. At the same time, Langrée avoids the bad
habit of incessantly poking at the music as if it were almost dead.
The
theme of this summer’s festival—it ends on August 27th, with the Mass
in C Minor—is “Travelling with Mozart.” We follow the composer on
various revenue-generating trips to Paris, Prague, and London; we
sample music from each country and hear Mozart’s works interpreted by
native ensembles and soloists. At times, the attempt to keep the
governing theme afloat results in awkward intellectual calisthenics.
When the Gabrieli Consort of London, under the direction of Paul
McCreesh, played Mozart’s great G-Minor Symphony, the program annotator
ventured that the work was somehow English in nature. I’d have guessed
we were in Italy; the performance was winningly fleet and graceful,
devoid of the Romantic histrionics that conductors sometimes bring to
this piece. Mozart was, in fact, music’s perfect cosmopolitan: wherever
he went, there he was.
The festival also wants to shake
up conventional patterns of programming, in an effort to simulate the
wildly varied concerts of Mozart’s time. In the opening weeks, concert
and opera arias enlivened the usual procession of overture, concerto,
and symphony, and a handsome parade of sopranos delivered them. Renée
Fleming, who sang at the opening-night gala, gave evidence of having
headlined one gala too many: she rendered a group of Handel arias in an
unintelligible, mannered style. The diva-in-chief was followed by a
posse of younger women who were determined to make an impression. Emma
Bell sang Mozart’s “Ah, lo previdi . . . Ah, t’in-vola agl’occhi miei”
with gleaming intonation and a buoyant personality; the aria is a howl
of fury, but Bell had fun with it. Sally Matthews gave dramatic heft to
“Ch’io mi scordi di te . . . Non temer, amato bene.” And Erin Wall, a
young Canadian, sang “Bella mia fiamma . . . Resta, o cara” with grace
and fire, showing the sort of righteous rage that would make for a
great Donna Anna. I hope someone from the Met was taking notes.
Since
Avery Fisher Hall opened, in 1962, various wizards have tried to fix
the erratic acoustics and consuming blandness of the place. The prime
innovation of this summer’s Mostly Mozart Festival has been to put in
place a temporary “Mozart stage,” which goes some way toward humanizing
the room. If the New York Philharmonic is smart, it will bring back the
new arrangement. The musicians now play on a Brazilian bloodwood
platform that extends thirty feet into the audience. There is extra
seating to the side and in back of the ensemble. The sound isn’t quite
voluptuous, but it’s fuller and richer than it was before: an array of
overhead baffles helps to bring focus. If you sit in the “courtside”
areas, you are practically inside the orchestra. You get to see the
body language of the musicians: a congratulatory nudge to a violinist
who has finessed a broken string; a sympathetic pat on the knee to an
oboist whose reed starts squawking in the summer heat; Langrée’s
inviting glances and grateful smiles. You also notice that the triangle
is incredibly loud for its size.
The late-night
concerts take place in the Kaplan Penthouse, ten floors above Lincoln
Center Plaza. A space usually reserved for institutional powwows has
been transformed (if you squint a little) into a classical Rainbow
Room, with candles on the tables and appropriate beverages. One night,
the gifted young pianist Jeremy Denk accompanied Emma Bell in Mozart
and Debussy songs, and also played Bach’s Third English Suite. He’s a
powerful, intelligent musician, as severe in Bach as he is sensuous in
Debussy. He is also a blogger, of all things. (His site,
jeremydenk.blogspot.com, contains a soaring description of Messiaen’s
“Quartet for the End of Time.”) A few nights later, Jean-Yves Thibaudet
rode the elevator up to the Penthouse to give a mini-recital of Satie’s
first “Gymnopédie” and Debussy’s Second Book of Préludes. Although
Thibaudet’s Debussy is a bit strict and dry for my taste, his
musicianship is impeccable, and he has an easy, charming way of talking
to the audience. When it came to the encore, he actually took requests:
Chopin won over Ravel.
The Mostly Mozart team must have wondered whether people would really venture into the wilds of the Upper West Side at 10:30 P.M.
No problem: both late-night concerts that I attended were
standing-room-only. And the audience was noticeably younger than the
one that showed up at Avery Fisher. Eight o’clock, the inviolable
starting time for classical events, is, for a lot of us, an awkward
hour; we’d rather be sitting down to dinner, not digesting. Younger
people also reportedly shy away from the concerts because they are
afraid of violating grandmotherly rules of decorum. The Mostly Mozart
late-night series, casually serious in tone, raises the possibility
that a large institution can carve out alternative identities, rather
than try to please several demographics all at once.
Most
concerts in big halls are two-dimensional experiences. The orchestra is
so far away that it may as well be a projection on a screen; the sound
has depth, but the image is flat. Change the perspective and the music
changes, too. Last spring, I happened to sit in Row A, right in front
of the orchestra, for a performance of “Tosca” at the Met. I could see
the sweat on Aprile Millo’s brow as she calculated each step into diva
madness. Zeffirelli’s grandiose sets soared on all sides, Roman
grandeur incarnate. One gentleman in the brass section read a New York
weekly while he waited for Scarpia’s ominous sonorities to arrive. The
man beside me whispered to his neighbor about the time he saw Callas;
the prompter muttered the tenor’s lines. I’ve never had more fun at the
opera.
