08-17 Teseo_Gp 3.qxt 8/5/14 11:19 AM Page 1 July 25–August 23, 2014 Sponsored by Bloomberg Sunday Afternoon, August 17, 2014, at 3:00 Pre-concert lecture by Ellen Rosand at 1:45 in the Stanley H. Kaplan Penthouse Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra Nicholas McGegan , Conductor Amanda Forsythe , Teseo M|M Amy Freston , Agilea M|M Dominique Labelle , Medea Céline Ricci , Clizia M|M Robin Blaze , Arcane M|M Drew Minter , Egeo Jeffrey Fields , Minerva’s priest M|M Jonathan Smucker , Tenor M|M HANDEL Teseo (1712) Teseo is an opera in five acts. It is approximately three hours long, with an intermission between Acts III and IV. M|M Mostly Mozart debut This performance is made possible in part by the Josie Robertson Fund for Lincoln Center. Alice Tully Hall, Starr Theater Please make certain your cellular phone, Adrienne Arsht Stage pager, or watch alarm is switched off. 08-17 Teseo_Gp 3.qxt 8/5/14 11:19 AM Page 2 Mostly Mozart Festival The Mostly Mozart Festival is sponsored by Upcoming Mostly Mozart Festival Events: Bloomberg. Tuesday Evening, August 19, at 7:30 The Mostly Mozart Festival is made possible by at Park Avenue Armory Rita E. and Gustave M. Hauser, The Fan Fox and International Contemporary Ensemble Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, Inc., Ann and ALL–ANNA THORVALDSDOTTIR PROGRAM Gordon Getty Foundation, Charles E. Culpeper Shades of Silence (New York premiere) Foundation, S.H. and Helen R. Scheuer Family Into—Second Self Foundation, and Friends of Mostly Mozart. In the Light of Air (New York premiere) Co-presented with Park Avenue Armory Public support is provided by the New York State Council on the Arts. Tuesday and Wednesday Evenings, August 19–20, at 8:00 in Avery Fisher Hall Artist Catering is provided by Zabar’s and Zabars.com. Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra David Zinman, Conductor MetLife is the National Sponsor of Lincoln Center. Joshua Bell, Violin Lawrence Power, Viola M|M Bloomberg is the Official Sponsor of Lincoln Center BOYCE : Symphony No. 1 Summer Programs. MOZART : Sinfonia concertante, K.364 BEETHOVEN : Symphony No. 3 (“Eroica”) Movado is an Official Sponsor of Lincoln Center. Pre-concert recitals at 7:00 by Igor Kamenz, piano United Airlines is the Official Airline of Lincoln Center. Wednesday Evening, August 20, at 7:30 at the Clark Studio Theater WABC-TV is the Official Broadcast Partner of Steven Schick, Percussion Lincoln Center. JOHN LUTHER ADAMS : The Mathematics of Resonant Bodies William Hill Estate Winery is the Official Wine of Lincoln Center. Thursday Evening, August 21, at 7:30 at Park Avenue Armory “Summer at Lincoln Center” is sponsored by Diet International Contemporary Ensemble Pepsi. Ellie Dehn, Soprano M|M DAI FUJIKURA : Minina (New York premiere) Time Out New York is Media Partner of Summer at JOHN ZORN : Baudelaires (New York premiere) Lincoln Center. ALVIN LUCIER : Chambers MESSIAEN (arr. Cliff Colnot): Chants de terre et de ciel (New York premiere) Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra’s appearance is Co-presented with Park Avenue Armory made possible in part by Ross Armstrong, David Low & Dominique Lahaussois, Martin & Kathy M|M Mostly Mozart debut Cohn, David & Mary Phillips, Doug & Carol Tanner and Donna Williams. For tickets, call (212) 721-6500 or visit MostlyMozart.org. Call the Lincoln Center Info Request Line at (212) 875-5766 to learn about program cancellations or request a Mostly Mozart brochure. Visit MostlyMozart.org for full festival listings. Join the conversation: #LCMozart We would like to remind you that the sound of coughing and rustling paper might distract the performers and your fellow audience members. In consideration of the performing artists and members of the audience, those who must leave before the end of the performance are asked to do so between pieces. The taking of photographs and the use of recording equipment are not allowed in the building. 08-17 Teseo_Gp 3.qxt 8/5/14 11:19 AM Page 3 Mostly Mozart Festival Welcome to Mostly Mozart I am delighted to welcome you to the 2014 Mostly Mozart Festival, where we explore the many facets of our namesake composer’s brilliance and invention. What better way to usher in that spirit than with an outdoor world premiere work by American composer John Luther Adams. Sila: The Breath of the World transforms Lincoln Center’s Hearst Plaza into a sonic stage before we rejoin Mozart in Avery Fisher Hall with the acclaimed Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra. This summer, our Festival Orchestra reaches beyond many Mozart masterpieces to the signature works of some of his great successors: Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique , Martin’s Polyptyque . We join with favorite soloists—Joshua Bell, Richard Goode, Christian Tetzlaff—and also introduce luminaries making their festival debuts, including pianists Yuja Wang and Steven Osborne, and bass Ildar Abdrazakov. We are always pleased to welcome the Mark Morris Dance Group to Mostly Mozart. This August, Mark Morris brings his unparalleled affinity for Handel to his newest creation, Acis and Galatea . The Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra and the Emerson String Quartet delight us in Alice Tully Hall, while the International Contemporary Ensemble celebrates new music at Park Avenue Armory. And don’t forget to join us for music and wine in casual, intimate Little Night Music recitals at the Kaplan Penthouse. We all embrace the joy that celebrating Mozart’s music brings to New York in the summer. I hope to see you often here at Lincoln Center. Jane Moss Ehrenkranz Artistic Director 08-17 Teseo_Gp 3.qxt 8/5/14 11:19 AM Page 4 Mostly Mozart Festival Signature Works by Peter A. Hoyt The musicologists who first investigated Johann Sebastian Bach (1685 –1750) discovered that some pieces, written in his handwriting and long attributed to him, were actually composed by other musicians. Bach had omitted their names during the copying process, and the scholars—disturbed by this hint of plagiarism—were relieved to learn that the early 18th century was often indifferent to niceties of attribution. Indeed, Bach himself frequently neglected to sign his own manuscripts. In the decades following, however, authorial identity took on greater importance. The col - lapse of the French aristocracy led Europe to emphasize individual merit, endowing artists with new dignity. Music publishers, capitalizing upon an emerging middle class, promoted composers by name. Unprecedented ideas of individuality informed 19th-century Romanticism, which asserted that all great art embodies the self-expression of a great soul. Contributing to this entanglement of artwork and artist were a number of innovative com - posers, each with a distinctive style that represented their identity as decisively as their name. The 2014 Mostly Mozart Festival celebrates some of these composers’ signature pieces, from emblematic concertos and symphonies—including Haydn’s “London,” Mozart’s “Jupiter,” and Beethoven’s “Eroica”—to concise works like the overtures to Haydn’s L’isola disabitata and Beethoven’s Consecration of the House . This season also explores the role of models in shaping artistic personalities. Gluck’s depic - tions of demonic Furies, for example, influenced Mozart’s music for Don Giovanni , and Gluck’s Dance of the Blessed Spirits permeates portions of Mozart’s Flute and Harp Concerto. Moreover, prominent stylistic elements can be parodied or dismantled, as in works by Prokofiev, Schnittke, and Shostakovich, whose Concerto for Piano and Trumpet recalls the brash music he once played for silent movies in Petrograd. Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique of 1830 stands as a landmark in the fusion of art and per - sona; the work is often regarded as autobiographical. Nevertheless, elements of the purely fictional prevail, as when the hero murders his beloved, is executed, and posthu - mously witnesses a witches’ sabbath. Berlioz treats his scenario with ironic detachment, perhaps best illustrated by the carnivalesque fugue that ends the piece. Whereas Mozart and Beethoven had employed culminating fugal procedures to suggest a kind of luminous unification, Berlioz here casts off the shackles of seriousness. The conflation of composition and composer continued until the 20th century, when attempts to use the former to psychoanalyze the latter demonstrated their incompatibility. Indeed, human creators tend to be overshadowed by the impact of their creations, perhaps explaining Bach’s negligence in labeling works—including his own—with the names of mere mortals. Music in performance, like a religious service or civic commemoration, can transform a group’s isolated members into a collective body. The Mostly Mozart Festival ends with Mozart’s Requiem and Passion music by Bach and Frank Martin—art that cele - brates the moment when the individual dissolves into the universal. —Copyright © 2014 by Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Inc. 08-17 Teseo_Gp 3.qxt 8/5/14 11:19 AM Page 5 Mostly Mozart Festival Synopsis Theseus’s safety, is a musical marvel. The solo oboe, silent during the instrumental by Ellen T. Harris introduction, only enters in response to The heroic exploits of the great mythologi - Agilea, like a second voice, so that the aria cal figure of Theseus (Teseo) are detailed in becomes a duet in which one of the Plutarch’s Life of Theseus and many other “singers” is absent in body, but whose classical sources. Handel’s opera depicts an presence is clear. In fact, Handel gives early part of Theseus’s life, when after his lovely orchestrations to Agilea’s arias upbringing in the small city of Troezen, he throughout the opera. Listen to the plain - arrives in Athens to identify himself as the tive bassoons in her Act III aria, “Vieni, son of Aegeus (Egeo) and claim his heritage. torna, idolo mio” as she longs for Theseus The libretto uses bits of the classical story to return, and the gentle, paired flutes in filled out with supplementary characters “Deh! v’aprite, oh luci belle” of Act IV and a good deal of romantic complication.