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COPYRIGHT 2005 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
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 periodinstrument 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...
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