Festival Preview: Mostly Mozart 2015

Lincoln Center's longest-running festival event returns for its 49th season.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

This year's Mostly Mozart Festival features optically enhanced Mozart. 
Either that or he's trying to look cool.
Image by StrangeStore

Before there was the Lincoln Center Festival, Midsummer Night's Swing or Lincoln Center Out of Doors, there was Mostly Mozart. This venerable celebration of all things classical, medium-sized and small returns to the Upper West Side for a month starting in the last week of July and continuing through the first three weeks of August. This year's schedule includes the New York premiere of George Benjamin's opera Written on Skin and appearances from piano luminaries like Pierre Laurent-Aimard, Jeremy Denk and Emanuel Ax, baritone Matthias Goerne and cellist Sol Gabetta in her Festival debut.

Festival Preview: Get Thee to a Nunnery (or Monastery)

Caramoor unveils its summer opera lineup. 
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Opera in concert at Caramoor's Venetian Theater.
Image © 2015 Caramoor Performing Arts Festival.

Located off a quiet suburban lane in Katonah, NY, the Rosen Estate is a gorgeous folly, an exercise in Renaissance Italian architecture slapped square in a corner of Westchester, NY. Happily, it is also home to Caramoor, a performing arts center whose annual festival features the best of opera, orchestral and chamber music.

Festival Preview: Red Bicycles, Tree-Women and Handmade Instruments

We look at the upcoming 2015 Lincoln Center Festival.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

He's ba-ack: Michael Keaton as Betelgeuse in Tim Burton's Beetlejuice.
The film's score is part of a six-day Danny Elfman retrospective at this year's Lincoln Center Festival.
Photo © 1988 Warner Brothers Entertainment/Geffen Films.

Since its inception in 1996, the Lincoln Center Festival has this mammoth venue's laboratory: its chance to experiment and offer new experiences in the appreciation of Western art music. The 2015 festival offers a compelling mix of German opera, Hollywood illusion and a long overdue re-assessment of a true American master, Harry Partch.