Stunning Conclusion to Mostly Mozart Fest

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Monday, 28 August 2017 14:44

Written by Jack Angstreich

Louis Langrée and the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra. Photo by Richard Termine

The concluding Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra concert of the season—presented at Lincoln Center's David Geffen Hall on the evening of Saturday, August 19th, and conducted enthusiastically by Music Director Louis Langrée—was an unusually memorable one and a superb finale.

Before the main performance, a worthwhile pre-concert recital featured star soloist Gil Shaham, along with Adele Anthony, in Sergei Prokofiev's intriguing Sonata for Two Violins.

The concert proper opened magnificently with a sterling account of Prokofiev's brilliant, enormously popular "Classical" Symphony, a work perfectly suited to this festival. 

A gripping reading of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's dark, amazingly precocious Symphony No. 25 conjured the Classical atmosphere evoked by the Prokofiev work,  satisfyingly closing the first half of the program.

For the second half, Shaham took the stage for a wonderful rendition of the exhilarating, unforgettable Violin Concerto of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky—a work with a debt to Mozart's majesty—providing a marvelous capstone to a fine festival.