Boy Blue’s Blak Whyte Gray makes a special return engagement at 2019 Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center (photo by Carl Fox)
Multiple venues at Lincoln Center
July 10 – August 9, free – $120
www.lincolncenter.org
With the demise of the Lincoln Center Festival last year, the institution’s Mostly Mozart Festival has filled in many of the gaps, expanding its breadth to cover much more than classical music and related events. Thus, its fifty-third season is a multidisciplinary affair with a wide variety of dance, theater, music, and film that is mostly non-Mozart. The summer festival begins July 10-13 with the world premiere of Mark Morris Dance Group’s Sport at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Rose Theater, set to Erik Satie’s “Sports et divertissements,” along with the company’s Empire Garden and V. Other dance programs include a special return engagement of Boy Blue’s Blak Whyte Gray August 1-3 at the Gerald Lynch Theater at John Jay College, with Kenrick “H2O” Sandy and Margo Jefferson participating in a talk after the August 2 performance, and the US premiere of Yang Liping Contemporary Dance’s Under Siege August 8-10 at the David H. Koch Theater, a lavish dance-theater production inspired by historic events in Chen Kaige’s Farewell, My Concubine, the 1993 epic that will be screened July 28 at the Walter Reade Theater. The festival will also be showing Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon on August 4, which features Oscar-winning production design by Tim Yip, the set and costume designer of Under Siege.
Yang Liping Contemporary Dance’s Under Siege makes its US premiere at Mostly Mozart Festival (photo by Ding Yi Jie)
Of course, there is plenty of Wolfgang Amadeus and other classical programs at the festival. The Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra will present Beethoven’s “Eroica Symphony” July 23-24, Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons” July 26-27, “Mozart & Brahms” July 30-31, “Beethoven & Schubert” August 2-3, “Joshua Bell Plays Dvořák” August 6-7, and “Mozart à la Haydn” August 9-10, all at David Geffen Hall. British theater group 1927’s production of The Magic Flute July 17-20 at the Koch features the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, a cast from Komische Oper Berlin, colorful animation, and imaginative set design. The intimate series “A Little Night Music” in the Stanley H. Kaplan Penthouse includes performances by cellist Kian Soltani and pianist Julio Elizalde; pianist Michael Brown; vocalist Nora Fischer and guitarist and vocalist Marnix Dorrestein; violinist Pekka Kuusisto and bassist Knut Erik Sundquist; soprano Susanna Phillips and pianist Myra Huang; pianist Martin Helmchen; pianists Lucas and Arthur Jussen in their New York debut; Brooklyn Rider; and pianist Steven Osborne. And on August 4, the Budapest Festival Orchestra will play works by Haydn, Handel, and Mozart at the Geffen, with soprano Jeanine De Bique, conducted by Iván Fischer.
Mostly Mozart Festival features New York production premiere of The Magic Flute by British theater group 1927 (photo by Michael Daniel)
One of the highlights of the festival is sure to be Davóne Tines and Michael Schachter’s The Black Clown July 24-27 at the Gerald Lynch, a musical theater piece based on Langston Hughes’s 1931 poem, with Tines as the title character, choreography by Chanel DaSilva, and set and costumes by Carlos Soto; the July 25 show will be followed by a talk with Tines, director Zack Winokur, and DaSilva. In addition, there are several free, first-come, first-served events: the panel discussion “Mozart’s Magic Flute: In His Time and Ours” July 20 at 3:00 at the Kaplan Penthouse; the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) performing works by Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Bergrún Snæbjörnsdóttir, and Ashley Fure at the David Rubenstein Atrium on July 25 at 7:30; the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, conducted by Louis Langrée, playing Mozart’s “Gran Partita” July 27 at 3:00 at St. Paul’s Chapel; ICE’s “Composer Portraits” program of works by Iranian composers Anahita Abbasi, Aida Shirazi, and Niloufar Nourbakhsh at the atrium August 5 at 7:00; and violinist Tessa Lark and bassist Michael Thurber at the atrium August 8 at 7:30.
Chantal Akerman’s No Home Movie was meant to be a kind of public eulogy for her beloved mother, Natalia (Nelly) Akerman, who died in 2014 at the age of eighty-six, shortly after Chantal had completed shooting forty hours of material with her. But it also ended up becoming, in its own way, a public eulogy for the highly influential Belgian auteur herself, as she died on October 5, 2015, at the age of sixty-five, only a few months after the film screened to widespread acclaim at several festivals (except at Locarno, where it was actually booed). Her death was reportedly a suicide, following a deep depression brought on by the loss of her mother. IFC is presenting a special screening on July 9, introduced by Akerman translator Corina Copp, who will read from Akerman’s final book, My Mother Laughs. 
Identity theft was much different in the sixteenth century than it is today. Daniel Vigne’s award-winning 1982 drama, The Return of Martin Guerre, relates the based-on-fact story of a man who has come back to the small, poor village of Artigat in the French countryside after being away for nearly a decade, fighting a war and journeying across Europe. “You will not regret having followed this story, for it is neither a tale of adventure nor an imaginary fable,” a narrator says at the beginning of the film. “It is a true story.” It also looks and sounds better than ever, in a lovely 4K director’s cut restoration opening at the Quad on July 5. The rather quiet and dull Martin Guerre (Stéphane Pean) disappears one night in 1542, to the consternation of his wife, Bertrande de Rols (first Sylvie Méda, then Nathalie Baye). She raises their son, Sanxi Guerre (Adrien Duquesne), by herself, with the help of her family, and remains faithful to Martin, believing he will return. Years later, Martin (Gérard Depardieu) suddenly shows up, more educated and worldly, filled with tales of his time away. The villagers are quick to welcome him back into the fold, including Bertrande and Sanxi; Martin’s sister Guillemette (Valérie Chassigneux); their uncle Pierre (Maurice Barrier), who has run the farm and married Bertrande’s mother, Raimonde de Rols (Rose Thiéry); and Martin’s friend Jacques (Philippe Babin). But slowly some of the peasants start questioning whether this Martin is actually an imposter taking advantage of Bertrande and Artigat, which leads to the arrival of Jean de Coras (Roger Planchon) of the Toulouse Parlement to interview Bertrande.
