MUSICAL EVENTS - REQUIEM FOR A FESTIVAL

Does the end of Mostly Mozart signal a rising disdain for classical music at Lincoln Center?

Musical summers in New York may never have been as rich as they were in the first two decades of the current century, when the Mostly Mozart Festival, under the leadership of Jane Moss, and the Lincoln Center Festival, under Nigel Redden, vied with each other in the conjuring of lavishly varied seasons. In and around the Lincoln Center complex you encountered not only the usual array of Mozart symphonies and concertos, which had been attracting steady crowds since 1966, but also Baroque music-and-dance spectacles by Mark Morris; orchestral cycles of Bruckner and Varèse; Wagner’s sixteen-hour “Ring”; Chen Shi-Zheng’s nineteen-hour “Peony Pavilion”; Bernd Alois Zimmer-mann’s apocalyptic antiwar opera, “Die Soldaten”; Davóne Tines and Michael Schachter’s apocalyptic anti-racist revue, “The Black Clown”; and avant-garde evenings of Pauline Oliveros and Kaija Saariaho, not to mention Persian ritual theatre, Georgian polyphony, Noh dramas, and Thai rock.