Free They Told Me Not to Take that Job: Tumult, Betrayal, Heroics, and the Transformation of Lincoln Center by Reynold Levy Page B

Yannick Nézet-Séguin (soon thereafter, selected to conduct the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and to become the maestro of the Philadelphia Orchestra), Osmo Vanska (conductor of the Minnesota Orchestra), and Pablo Heras-Casado (also bound to conduct at the Met and to become the music director of the St. Luke’s Orchestra). They played with special guest artists who were at the pinnacle of their careers: Stephanie Blythe, Susanna Phillips, Renee Fleming, Dmitri Hvorostovsky, Emanuel Ax, Leif Ove-Andsnes, Pierre Laurent-Aimard, Yo-Yo Ma, Alisa Weilerstein, and Martin Frost, among many others. And they performed not only the classical repertory, but also works of living composers, like Golijov, Adams, and Saariaho.
    After some of the concerts in Avery Fisher Hall, a 2,700-seat venue, Moss would invite solo artists or trios and quartets to perform at 10:30 p.m. in the 240-seat, nightclub-like setting of the Kaplan Penthouse overlooking the Hudson River. In that candlelit, romantic venue, the age of the audience plummeted; hemlines rose; backpacks were unloaded; and music acquired spellbinding intimacy, proximity, and immediacy.
    While the orchestra remained the centerpiece of the festival, it was surrounded by innovation. For the first time in its history, the Mostly Mozart Festival offered staged operas, among them Don Giovanni and Le Nozze di Figaro , both performed by the Budapest Festival Orchestra, conducted and directed by Ivan Fischer; The Flowering Tree , anew opera by John Adams, directed by Peter Sellars; Mozart’s Laide , also directed by Sellars; Il Re Pastore , directed by Mark Lamos; and a revival of Jonathan Miller’s Cosi fan Tutte .
    Contemporaneous with such offerings were performances by William Christie and Les Arts Florissants, the Tallis Scholars, Gidon Kremer’s Kremerara Baltica, the Leipzig String Quartet, the Emerson String Quartet, and the International Contemporary Ensemble.
    A mainstay of the festival has been the Mark Morris Dance Company. It has performed L’Allegro Il Penseroso ed il Moderato , Dido Aeneas , and as a world premiere, Mozart Dances , among other pieces.
    These are all expensive initiatives and actions. They required even more ambitious fund-raising. I enjoyed taking the lead in rallying the staff and board to acquire for Lincoln Center new and generous supporters.
    What Jane Moss accomplished with the Mostly Mozart Festival was and remains astounding. She built on the basic idea of celebrating Mozart’s brilliance, but construed that undertaking broadly and imaginatively. Who influenced Mozart, and which composers and musicians were most influenced by him? How is his work reflected in the music, the visual art, and the literature of his time? To what extent was Mozart the product of his own environment and extensive travel, and in what degree did he transcend them? How does Mozart’s work influence today’s musicians and composers? What mixture of nature and nurture accounts for his genius? These are some of the probing and fascinating questions that animated Moss’s brilliant programming choices.
    In working closely with Louis Langrée, classicism and innovation were viewed as entirely compatible. Mozart’s music was enhanced and its essence revealed, not negated or superseded, by incorporating the music of other composers, dead and alive, into the festival. Adding different performing groups and programming elements into the festival also enlivened this summer tradition.
    The ubiquity, consistency, and constancy of elaborate praise for the Mostly Mozart Festival was gratifying. While each critic was partial to his or her favorite features of this four-week cornucopia of events, what they seemed to share was respect. They held in high regard the fact that it was ideas that animated the festival, well-articulated points of view. One might take issue with some of them, but their worthiness as organizing principles was undeniable.
    Peter Davies at New York Magazine , Justin