Review: Lincoln Center’s Festival Orchestra Concert Is Mostly Mozart under Maestro Glover

“Timeless Transformations” is a key theme of the Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center’s season at Geffen Hall this year (itself transformed from Avery Fisher Hall and, earlier, Philharmonic Hall). It certainly ran rampant last weekend, as British conductor Dame Jane Glover led the orchestral musicians and some bright soloists through their paces in works by Michael Abels (via Vivaldi), Tchaikovsky and Mozart.

It was an evening of cooling pleasures on a hot summer night—a reminder of the early days of the former Mostly Mozart Festival, with familiar sounds providing a soothing evening’s entertainment.

In this Avery Fisher Legacy Concert, Abels’s “More Seasons” opened the program, though it was hard to discern whether the listeners’ enthusiasm was for the new-ish piece itself (from 1990), which lasted just 12 minutes or for Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons,” upon which it heavily leans. Whichever it might be, the Pulitzer-prize winner’s work—he was in attendance--was an audience pleaser.

It was followed closely by Tchaikovsky’s “Variations on a Rococo Theme,” featuring Sterling Elliott, a 2021 Avery Fisher Career Grant Recipient, in a delicate performance in which his fingers flew across the keyboard. Unlike the Abels work, the “Variations” didn’t draw on a single piece in its quest for transformation but from “the entire rococo aesthetic,” as the written notes on the composition explained, which was “a sort of bridge between the Baroque and Classical eras.” Elliott is an ingratiating presence who left those in attendance wanting more.

The particular reason for my interest in the concert was the second half of the evening, taken over by fragments of an unfinished Mozart opera, ZAIDE. It’s a singspiel, with lots of dialogue, by Mozart that his wife, Constanze, gathered together after his death, in her attempt to keep his legacy alive (and the money rolling in). True, there is no official overture, though the “Allegro assai from Symphony No. 33” is believed to have been adapted from what the composer intended as one, and was included on the program.

But this music is no throwaway by any means, says the conductor, who proclaims one of the arias “one of the best Mozart ever wrote” (“Ruhe sanft,” which soprano Felicity Lott sang on the “Amadeus” soundtrack, and soprano Erika Baikoff sang sublimely at this concert). Glover believes, as quoted in the program, that his music here showed Mozart “on the cusp of that total operatic maturity that he reached with IDOMENEO.”

Tenor Eric Ferring was a pleasing addition to the cast, with bass-baritone Ben Strong adding a little heft to the final trio.

As was the case with a version of Verdi’s MACBETH I heard from Teatro Nuovo a few nights earlier, while this was an unfinished work, the brilliance of a master shone through. Even if the concert as a whole didn’t put too many demands on us in the audience, it was filled with small (and some larger) pleasures that I wouldn’t have missed.

Caption: (l to r) soprano Erika Baikoff, tenor Eric Ferring, Maestro Glover, bass-baritone Ben Strong

Photo credit: Lawrence Sumulong