MOSTLY MOZART FESTIVAL 2014 Releases Highlights of Week 2, 8/4 - 8/10

The second week of Lincoln Center's Mostly Mozart Festival, New York's acclaimed annual summer celebration of classical music, features a wide range of events, including orchestral music, chamber music, and a New York premiere of a new Mark Morris Dance Group production incorporating both opera and modern dance. Starting off the second week is the acclaimed Emerson String Quartet, a frequent guest to the Festival, on Monday, August 4 at Alice Tully Hall, with a program of works by Mozart and Haydn featuring the clarinetist Martin Fröst. Later that evening, Fröst will perform a second concert, this time in a late-night recital of works by Mozart, Debussy, and Poulenc with pianist Shai Wosner and violist Antoine Tamestit, as part of the popular series A Little Night Music in the Stanley H. Kaplan Penthouse. Later in the week, Germany's eminent chamber orchestra The Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen returns to Mostly Mozart with an all-Brahms program at Alice Tully Hall on Thursday, August 7. The concert will be led by the ensemble's Artistic Director Paavo Järvi, and feature pianist LarsVogt.

One of the major highlights of this summer's Festival is the New York premiere of a new production by the Mark Morris Dance Group in the epic love tale of Acis and Galatea, August 7-9 at the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center. In this new work, a Lincoln Center co-commission, Mark Morris revisits Handel with a bold, new approach, bringing opera and modern dance to Mozart's arrangement of Handel's original score. Joining the group's dancers are four singers who will sing the work in English: Thomas Cooley (Acis), Yulia Van Doren (Galatea, replacing the previously announced Sherezade Panthaki),Douglas Williams (Polyphemus), and Isaiah Bell (Damon, replacing the previously announced Zach Finkelstein). Three of the four leads - Cooley, Bell, and Williams - will be making their Festival debuts. The Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra and Chorale, early-music specialists and led by music director Nicholas McGegan, will perform the music. Following the production's world premiere this past April, The New York Times wrote: "The most singularly beautiful creation of the Mark Morris Daice Group I have seen..." Lincoln Center's Ehrenkranz Artistic Director Jane Moss will lead a pre-performance discussion with Mark Morris on August 8 at the David Rubenstein Atrium. Acis and Galatea is a Mark Morris Dance Group/Cal Performances, Berkeley/Celebrity Series of Boston production, developed in association with Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts; Harriman-Jewell Series, Kansas City; and Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Throughout the week, the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra will present two pairs of concerts with outstanding guest soloists. Music Director Louis Langrée leads the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra on August 5 and 6 in four works that touch on the music of Mozart and Haydn. Leading off the concerts is Schnittke's Moz-Art à la Haydn, a humorous piece sprinkled with works by both composers. Renowned violinist Christian Tetzlaff, joins the Festival Orchestra for Mozart's Violin Concerto No. 1 in B-flat major, K.207, which will be followed by Haydn's Overture to L'isola disabitata, and Mozart's Symphony No. 38 in D major, K.504, "Prague." Tetzlaff will also perform pre-concert recitals ahead of each Festival Orchestra concert. On August 8 and 9,Osmo Vänskä returns to Mostly Mozart to conduct a wide-ranging program including Prokofiev's Symphony No. 1, "Classical," a work inspired by Haydn and Mozart, and Beethoven's Symphony No. 8. Between these works will be Shostakovich's intrepid Concerto No. 1, Op. 35 from 1933, also known as the Concerto for Piano and Trumpet. The soloists for this performance, London Symphony Orchestra Principal Trumpet Philip Cobb and pianist Yuja Wang, will both make their Festival debuts. Like Tetzlaff, Cobb will perform a pre-concert recital before the August 8 and 9 orchestra concerts.

In addition to all of the live performances, the Festival will present a special film screening to further complement the music heard on stage. On Sunday, August 10, the Festival will present "Handel on Film," featuring excerpts from a performance by the Academy of Ancient Music with conductor Christopher Hogwood (replacing the previously announced excerpts from a 2006 taping with the London Symphony Orchestra). Complementing this is a short biopic from the 1998 series Harmonics: The Innovators of Classical Music, which traces Handel's distinguished career, focusing on his great output of operas and oratorios, and his musical innovations.

The Mostly Mozart Festival 2014 is sponsored by Bloomberg

All programs and artists are subject to change.

Tickets for Mostly Mozart Festival 2014 can be purchased online at MostlyMozart.org, by phone via CenterCharge at 212-721-6500, or by visiting the Avery Fisher Hall or Alice Tully Hall box offices at Broadway and 65th St.

Lincoln Center's Mostly Mozart Festival-America's first indoor summer music festival-was launched as an experiment in 1966. Called Midsummer Serenades: A Mozart Festival, its first two seasons were devoted exclusively to the music of Mozart. Renamed the Mostly Mozart Festival in 1970, it has become a New York institution and, now in its 48th year, continues to broaden its focus to include works by Mozart's predecessors, contemporaries, and related successors. It is currently the only group in the United States dedicated to the Classical period. In addition to concerts by the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra,Mostly Mozart now includes concerts by visiting period-instrument ensembles, chamber orchestras and ensembles, and acclaimed soloists, as well as staged music presentations, opera productions, dance, film, and visual art.

The Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra is the resident orchestra of the Mostly Mozart Festival. Over the years, the Orchestra has toured to such notable festivals and venues as Ravinia, Great Woods, Tanglewood, Bunkamura in Tokyo, and the Kennedy Center. Conductors who made their New York debuts leading the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra include Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Charles Dutoit, Leonard Slatkin, David Zinman, and Edo de Waart. Soloists including Joshua Bell, Itzhak Perlman, Pinchas Zukerman, Alicia de Larrocha, Richard Stoltzman, Emanuel Ax, and Garrick Ohlsson have had long associations with the Festival. Mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli, flutist James Galway, soprano Elly Ameling, and pianist Mitsuko Uchida all made their U.S. debuts at the Mostly Mozart Festival.

Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts (LCPA) serves three primary roles: presenter of artistic programming, national leader in arts and education and community relations, and manager of the Lincoln Center campus. A presenter of more than 3,000 free and ticketed events, performances, tours, and educational activities annually, LCPA offers 15 series, festivals, and programs including American Songbook, Avery Fisher Artist Program, Great Performers, Lincoln Center Festival, Lincoln Center Out of Doors, Midsummer Night Swing, Martin E. Segal Awards, Meet the Artist, Mostly Mozart Festival, Target Free Thursdays, and the White Light Festival, as well as the Emmy Award-winning Live From Lincoln Center, which airs nationally on PBS. As manager of the Lincoln Center campus, LCPA provides support and services for the Lincoln Center complex and its 11 resident organizations, which include the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, The Film Society of Lincoln Center, Jazz at Lincoln Center, The Juilliard School, Lincoln Center Theater, The Metropolitan Opera, New York City Ballet, New York Philharmonic, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, the School of American Ballet and Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. In addition, LCPA led a $1.2 billion campus renovation, completed in October 2012.

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Visit MostlyMozart.org for information about the Festival and other updates.