Praise from the New York Times for Gemma New's Mostly Mozart Debut

*Photo by Lawrence Sumulong,* © *Lincoln Center*

Mostly Mozart’s Repertoire Broadens with Its Audience
By Oussama Zahr
The New York Times
August 7, 2023

For the past 10 months, the back side of David Geffen Hall has greeted passers-by with Nina Chanel Abney’s installation “San Juan Heal”. Its bold, color-blocked illustrations pay tribute to the largely Black and Puerto Rican neighborhood that was torn down to make way for Lincoln Center in the mid-20th century.

“San Juan Heal” was a way of acknowledging this performing-arts campus’s original sin. When it was announced, Henry Timms, the center’s president and chief executive, said, “We’ve been very intentional about thinking about different voices, different audiences, more people seeing themselves at Lincoln Center.”

But as the months passed, I began to wonder: Are there more people of color on the building than inside it? If the installation is both a nod to the past and a hope for the future, then what is Lincoln Center doing to get there?

The Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, which has taken up residence at Geffen Hall for two and a half weeks as part of Lincoln Center’s Summer for the City programming, has a lot of ideas on that front. With so few concerts, it has little time to capture audience interest, but it also has more room to be conceptually agile.

Near the end of July, the ensemble’s concerts began with a premiere by the Iraqi American composer Amir ElSaffar, featuring his Two Rivers ensemble, and continued with programs — led by Thomas Wilkins, Gemma New and Jonathon Heyward — that featured contemporary works about identity and equity while otherwise sticking to the orchestra’s unofficial remit of familiar, easy-on-the-ears repertoire. The performances ranged from workaday to exhilarating.

Despite this orchestra’s name, Mozart made just one appearance in the three recent programs, when New conducted his “Prague” Symphony, a sterling example of his mature style, woven together with unmistakable snatches of the operatic masterpieces he wrote around the same time, “Le Nozze di Figaro” and “Don Giovanni.”

New cultivated a fine core of color and volume and shifted from it in gradations, though she didn’t necessarily mine the Andante’s introspection or the Presto’s drama. She also led Mendelssohn’s Piano Concerto No. 1 and Sarah Gibson’s “warp & weft,” a mysterious, openhearted, at times astringent tribute to the feminist art movement of the 1970s that fought to elevate so-called women’s work from craft to fine art.

Read the full review here.

In New York, Gemma New makes “Mostly Mozart” mostly magic
By David Wolfson
bachtrack
August 2, 2023

New Zealand conductor Gemma New led the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra in a “Prague” Symphony that was about 80% pure magic and the rest good, solid music making, like a bird soaring on thermals that occasionally has to flap its wings.

The program opened with the New York Premiere of Sarah Gibson’s warp & weft. The title refers to the art of weaving, as a woman’s art not usually seen in a high-art context. Gibson introduced the work, saying that the recurring chord progression represented the warp, while the ongoing melody represented the weft. I did not find this helpful. For one thing, the chord progression, constructed of parallel triads, has a more accessible melodic aspect than most of what comes between, which is melodic only sporadically, unless perhaps one counts Klangfarbenmelodie. Toward the middle of the piece even that seems to evaporate, and it frankly begins to meander until it regains the thread (sorry) and begins to build to a strangely bottom-lacking climax.

Warp & weft is sonically and orchestrationally ingenious, though, and made for an interesting listening experience despite its structural vagueness. New delivered an incisive clarity of texture throughout, highlighting noodling on muted piano strings, aggressive quacking from the brass, hissing cymbals and defiant repeated string stabs.

Stewart Goodyear covered all the bases as soloist in Mendelssohn’s Piano Concerto no. 1 in G minor, from thundering octaves and precision filigree to exquisite lyrical playing. His and New’s tempi were virtuosically fast, but not horrifyingly so; the concerto came across as a comfortable exhibition of skill, not a gallop along a precipice. I did detect a couple of difficulties in coordination between soloist and orchestra; and New coaxed such a luscious tone from the low strings in their statement of the second movement’s main tune that it stole focus from Goodyear. But pianist and conductor came together nicely to build tension before the cruise to the double bar. Goodyear’s encore, his own Panorama, inspired by his half-Trinidadian heritage, was more interesting than the concerto. Imagine if Liszt had written a Caribbean Rhapsody instead of Hungarian, except while channeling Bartók.

With the opening notes of the slow introduction, New announced that we were in for a uniquely vivid reading of Mozart’s “Prague” Symphony. Notes became gestures; gestures became drama; the music breathed and flexed. When the Allegro began, string runs had the power of horn rips, and the sheer exuberance of it conjured images of powerful animals running for sheer joy. But the Andante was truly the revelation. The slow movement of a Classical symphony overstays its welcome as often as not, just something you have to sit through to get to the finale, but New made this one a gripping adventure. Somehow she and the orchestra gave it simultaneously a grounded physicality and a floating quality. Every phrase’s intention was crystal-clear and heartbreakingly effective.

But this was my first time hearing New conduct, and I’m a fan (a “Newbie”, perhaps?). I hope we get to hear her in New York again soon and often.

Read the full review here.