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. Now a New York institution, Mostly Mozart continues to broaden its focus to include works by Mozart’s predecessors, contemporaries, and related successors.
In addition to concerts by the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, Mostly Mozart now includes concerts by the world’s outstanding period-instrument ensembles, chamber orchestras and ensembles, and acclaimed soloists, as well as opera productions, dance, film, late-night performances, and visual art installations. Contemporary music has become an essential part of the festival, embodied in annual artists-in-residence, including Osvaldo Golijov, John Adams, Kaija Saariaho, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, and the International Contemporary Ensemble. Among the many artists and ensembles who have had long associations with the festival are Joshua Bell, Christian Tetzlaff, Itzhak Perlman, Emanuel Ax, Garrick Ohlsson, Stephen Hough, Osmo Vänskä, the Emerson String Quartet, Freiburg Baroque Orchestra, Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, and the Mark Morris Dance Group.
Learn more about the Mostly Mozart Festival at mostlymozart.org.
