Edition: U.S. / Global

Review/Concert; Mostly Mozart Begins, With an All-Mozart Bill

Published: July 11, 1991

The Mozartmania that has swept much of the world this year is a mixed blessing, at best. Still, there was ample reason to celebrate on Tuesday evening, when Mostly Mozart opened its 25th season at Avery Fisher Hall. The observance of the bicentenary of the composer's death has captured the public imagination to a degree that could scarcely have been imagined at the bicentenary of his birth, in 1956.

The runaway success of Peter Shaffer's "Amadeus" -- the play and, even more, the film -- was undoubtedly a factor in the Mozart boom of recent years, and of course the machinery of media hype can create prodigies far beyond those of even a decade or two ago. But the Mostly Mozart phenomenon played no small role in preparing the ground for an interest in the composer that has far transcended classical music precincts.

Mostly Mozart began in 1966 under the title Midsummer Serenades in Philharmonic Hall, as Fisher was then called. With low prices and an informal air, it was aimed at a broad, youthful audience, and almost immediately achieved it. The catchy name Mostly Mozart, which was adopted in 1970, quickly entered the vocabulary and surely added to the event's mystique. Imitators sprang up so widely that the name Mozart has by now become almost synonymous with summer music.

As William Lockwood, a festival founder and now its director, has aptly pointed out, Mozart was by no means central to the standard repertory in 1966, though he occupied an honored place: somewhat below Beethoven, a little higher than Haydn. All of that has changed, thanks largely to Mostly Mozart and its followers.

So here the festival is, celebrating its 25th anniversary, and doing so, as serendipity would have it, at the very crest of a Mozartean wave that it helped cause. (However the composer's popularity may hold up, it is hard to see how it could rise much higher.) And even now, Mostly Mozart retains a pivotal role in the worldwide celebration, for Lincoln Center's whole year-and-a-half-long bicentennial extravaganza was conceived as a way to commemorate the festival's landmark anniversary.

Given all this weight of significance, Tuesday's concert proved appealingly modest. As the season-opening concert usually is, it was televised nationally on PBS's "Live From Lincoln Center." But there were no speeches, no evident self-congratulation.

Gerard Schwarz, who has been the music director since 1984, led an all-Mozart program, opening with the Overture to "The Marriage of Figaro" and including the three-movement Symphony in D from the "Posthorn" Serenade (K. 320). James Galway played the Flute Concerto in G (K. 313), Andre Watts the "Jeunehomme" Piano Concerto in E flat (K. 271).

The performances were pretty much what the listener has come to expect of the festival these days. During Mr. Schwarz's tenure, the orchestra has almost always played respectably and often very well indeed. Here, there were small but consistent problems in the horns during the first half of the program and some occasional stridency in the woodwinds, but the playing was generally polished. Mr. Schwarz's interpretations were typically spirited and straightforward.

Mr. Galway was deft from the outset in his concerto, and he seemed to warm to his task as the piece progressed. He injected ornaments felicitously but sparely in the Adagio, more liberally in the finale. His adventurous first-movement cadenza carried him far afield harmonically and lurched rather precipitately back home.

Mr. Watts played cleanly and elegantly for the most part, perhaps too daintily at times. Some scrupulously rounded phrases in the first movement began and ended almost inaudibly. But the pianist let loose in the rousing moments of the finale with a real virtuosic flair.