“The Mostly Mozart Festival,” intoned Louis Langrée, as the maestro prepared to conduct his final symphony at Lincoln Center’s David Geffen Hall August 12, after 21 years at the helm of the annual summer event, “is no more.” Langrée was being dramatic, but not overly so. Lincoln Center’s dissolution of Mostly Mozart, and its stripping of the festival’s musicians of the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra name, is a big deal—or it should be. That it’s received so little attention is yet another sign of how post-pandemic New York has lost its will to fight for its civic and public culture.
Mostly Mozart is, or was, synonymous with Lincoln Center. The July and August weeks-long festival of, yes, mostly Mozart and other classical composers dated to 1966, almost to Lincoln Center’s founding (give or take a pandemic, and a few first-decade hiccups).
So why get rid of it? And why do so in such a harsh fashion, turning the first summer since 2019 that concertgoers have been able to enjoy a normal season into a depressing and confusing time, rather than a joyful one?
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