Baritone Thomas Meglioranza, accompanied by Reiko Uchida on piano, presented a worthwhile pre-concert recital of selections from Hugo Wolf's Mörike-Lieder, which are set to texts by the great 19th-century German poet, Eduard Mörike, who, it is interesting to note, wrote an esteemed book about Mozart. The singer was at his most rewarding in his upper register.

 

The concert proper was an all-Mozart program given by the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra under the confident baton of the festival director, Louis Langrée, opening with a superb account of the rarely played Symphony No. 1, written, astonishingly, when the composer was eight years old. The wonderful soloist, Richard Goode, then took the stage for a splendid  performance of the delightful Piano Concerto No. 12, playing Mozart's cadenza.

 

The evening achieved a satisfying closure with the magnificent Symphony No. 41, the "Jupiter" — Mozart's final opus in that genre. Langrée and the musicians delivered many especially beautiful moments throughout their realization of the work, especially  coming into their own in the amazing last movement. Evidently the composer completed the work on August 10th, 1788, and to celebrate that fact, the conductor graciously led the orchestra in a repetition of the coda from the work, after a warm ovation.

 

More fine music could be heard at the same location on the evening of Friday the 12th, with the program repeated the following night. An enjoyable pre-concert recital featured the young musicians comprising the Lysander Piano Trio performing the lovely Piano Trio in F-sharp minor by Franz Joseph Haydn followed by Franz Liszt's exhilarating Hungarian Rhapsody No. 9, "Le carnaval de Pesth".

 

The concert proper consisted of three major Mozart piano concertos sensitively rendered by the Festival Orchestra, accompanying the brilliant Jeffrey Kahane, who played his own cadenzas and, amazingly, conducted from the piano. The enduringly popular No. 21 in C major — made famous for the use of the Andante on the soundtrack of the outstanding 1960s film, Elvira Madigan, directed by the late Bo Widerberg — opened the program — the glorious second movement was especially strong. Even more impressive was the reading of the somber No. 24 in C minor that ensued while Kahane and the musicians capped a memorable evening with a sterling account of the exquisite No. 22 in E-flat major.

 

The middle of the fourth week of the festival featured the enormously popular violinist Joshua Bell as conductor and soloist with the Festival Orchestra and, on the weekend, a closing pair of performances by the same ensemble, here led by Langrée, and expanded by the estimable Concert Chorale of New York under the solid direction of James Bagwell. The programs were devoted to two towering, unfinished choral masterpieces by Mozart, the Mass in C minor and the Requiem, the composer's swan song. The Mass was heard in an effective version completed by Langrée while the Requiem was realized in a satisfying completion by Mozart's pupils, Franz Xaver Süssmayr and Joseph Eybler, along with Langrée.

 

On the evening of Saturday, August 20th, both pieces were presented powerfully with an admirable slate of singers: soprano Joélle Harvey, mezzo-soprano Cecelia Hall, the handsome tenor Alek Shrader, and bass-baritone Christian Van Horn. To celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of this festival, the enthusiastic Langrée generously led the ensemble in a repeat of the opening of the Requiem's Lacrimosa, the last notes Mozart ever composed.

 

The final week of this season featured a revival at the David Koch Theater of the often lovely Mozart Dances, by the gifted choreographer Mark Morris, who has had an enduring association with the festival. This 2006 work was commissioned by Lincoln Center to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth.

 

An entertaining, occasionally hilarious, pre-performance discussion between the choreographer and Ara Guzelimian took place at the David Rubinstein Atrium on the evening of Friday, August 26th. Here Morris stressed that he choreographs and rehearses to live music and that he "plays slow movements slow" while emphasizing the musicality of the dancers in his company. He also praised the René Jacobs recording of Così fan tutte.

 

Mozart Dances is set to music written during the composer's extraordinary decade in Vienna: his underrated Piano Concerto No. 11, the wonderful Sonata in D major for Two Pianos, and the magisterial, final Piano Concerto, the 27th, all beautifully performed by the outstanding Garrick Ohlsson, assisted in the Sonata by the accomplished Inon Barnatan. (The Festival Orchestra under the expert direction of Langrée sounded marvelous in the concerti.)

 

The dancers in this company are striking for how different their physical type is from that of New York City Ballet, whom are usually seen in this venue. They engagingly inhabited the choreographer's vision the hallmark of which is wit — or what is called "esprit" in French — surely also a nearly ubiquitous element in Mozart's music, thus rendering the pairing an inspired one. Here as elsewhere the ethos was strongly reminiscent of the remarkable Paul Taylor who, with his postmodern sensibility, seems to be what the literary critic Harold Bloom would call the "authentic precursor" of Morris. Seeing this was a satisfying conclusion to a well-executed festival.