By Sedgwick Clark<\/b><\/p>\n
<\/b>Lincoln Center was once a place I avoided like the plague in the summer\u2014staid programs, mediocre performances\u2014but there\u2019s no denying that the kinks have long been worked out of its two major summer festivals. One may have one\u2019s likes and dislikes, as I expressed last week about three of this summer\u2019s Lincoln Center Festival offerings, but this series\u2019 events have been imaginatively concocted from the very beginning, in 1996, under directors John Rockwell for the first two seasons and thence by Nigel Redden.<\/p>\n
Lincoln Center\u2019s long-popular Mostly Mozart Festival has been in good shape for so long that many New Yorkers have forgotten that the orchestra was a scrappy band of sight readers before Gerard Schwarz was named its first music director in 1984 after two years as music advisor, during which he had transformed its performance level and previously formulaic repertoire immeasurably. But even he eventually succumbed to the straitjacket of box-office demand (\u201cThe first concert to sell out is the all-Vivaldi one,\u201d he once groaned to me with exasperation) and was controversially eased out by LC Artistic Director Jane Moss. French conductor Louis Langr\u00e9e was enlisted as MM\u2019s new music director, and he and Moss have varied both artists and repertoire quite successfully, on a consistently reliable performance level.<\/p>\n
Take, for example, last Saturday\u2019s canny non-Mozart program conducted by Finnish conductor Osmo V\u00e4nsk\u00e4 (MA\u2019s Conductor of the Year in 2005). This was his first New York appearance since slaying the Tea Party union busters on the Minnesota Orchestra\u2019s board of directors and triumphantly returning to his post as music director. All of the works were well known, yet together they seemed brand new. In Prokofiev\u2019s Classical Symphony<\/i>, Shostakovich\u2019s First Piano Concerto, <\/i>and Beethoven\u2019s Eighth, every instrumental choir spoke in perfect balance, revealing ear-opening details, sprightly rhythms, witty accentuation, and V\u00e4nsk\u00e4\u2019s trademark ability to coax feathery ppps from the strings. There were moments when more sound would have been desirable, but the results overall were so musical that complaints were minimal.<\/p>\n
The astonishing 27-year-old pianist Yuja Wang was playing the concerto for only the fourth time, and she brought the house down midway in the concert with the parodic silent-movie burlesquerie <\/i>of the Shostakovich concerto, scored for solo piano, strings, and trumpet (magnificently played by the London Symphony\u2019s new first trumpet, Philip Cobb). Backstage afterwards I suggested that she should record the two Shostakovich concertos and she laughed, \u201cThe Second is too easy.\u201d Well, he had composed it in the mid-Fifties for his young son, Maxim, but it\u2019s a delightful piece, nonetheless. She had played the First at the Hollywood Bowl earlier in the summer along with Prokofiev\u2019s saucily virtuosic First Concerto for the first time; seems to me that the two Shosta\u2019s and the Prok First would make a great coupling. Then, as sales roll in, Deutsche Grammophon could pair her in Prok\u2019s hugely virtuosic Second and Third concertos, and then finish the cycle with Prok\u2019s Left-Hand (the Fourth) and Fifth and throw in Khachaturian\u2019s Piano Concerto. What a great CD trio of 20th-century Russian piano classics!\u00a0 Are you listening, DG?<\/p>\n
The concert was short by current standards, and PK and I were strolling on Lincoln Center\u2019s Plaza by 9:45. Happy visitors surrounded the fountain. A brilliant full moon was in perigee, and several members of the Amateur Astronomers Association of New York were on hand with their telescopes to give onlookers the opportunity to view craters close-up. After taking a good look (the craters are most visible on the rim of the moon, we were reliably informed), we bought gelatos and settled down comfortably amidst the trees facing the Henry Moore sculpture in the reflecting pool and what Juilliard students have dubbed the \u201cgrassy knoll.\u201d I must admit that the Center\u2019s renovations have successfully opened up the original, clunky design of this part of the plaza, which is now more in tune with Eero Saarinen\u2019s spacious Vivian Beaumont Theater design, which was always recognized as the most attractive building of the Center.<\/p>\n
If regular readers suspect that I\u2019ve lost my customarily jaundiced mind, all I can say is that such post-concert reverie must be the product of the music-making we had just heard.<\/p>\n