“Mostly Mozart Festival on WQXR,” a week-long radio festival on New York’s classical radio station, will be capped on Aug. 16 by the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra’s Beethoven Akademie 1808 concert performed last season in Music Hall and conducted by music director Louis Langrée.

On Monday, WQXR and Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts announced a partnership to broadcast archival performances from the annual Mostly Mozart Festival, as well as interviews, discussions and “pop-up” performances daily from Aug. 10 to Aug. 16.  New Yorkers can listen at 105.9-FM, or anyone may stream it online at wqxr.org. On opening day, a series of pop-up outdoor performances across all five New York City boroughs will stream live on WQXR’s Facebook page.

Due to Covid-19, Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival, which is led by Langrée, was canceled for the first time since its founding in 1966.

The festival will close on Aug. 16 with the CSO’s recreation of Beethoven’s legendary Akademie 1808, the most important concert of the composer’s lifetime (Aug 16, 5 pm ET). Langrée had intended to lead the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra in this extravagant program — four hours of some of the greatest music Beethoven ever wrote. Instead, the festival will feature the performance recorded in Music Hall on March 1, 2020 with Langrée conducting the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and featuring the May Festival Chorus prepared by Director of Choruses Robert Porco.

Beethoven’s Akademie 1808 program included the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies and the Choral Fantasy, as well as the first public performance of the Fourth Piano Concerto. The program also showcased three movements from his Mass in C, the dramatic concert aria Ah! Perfido, and an improvised Fantasia. Pianist Inon Barnatan is soloist in the concerto and the Choral Fantasy, and improvised his own Fantasia in the style Beethoven. Soloists for the Choral Fantasy and Mass in C are soprano Janai Brugger, mezzo-soprano Joyner Horn, tenor Thomas Cooley, tenor Victor Cardamone, and bass Nicholas Brownlee.

Here is my review from that concert in Cincinnati. It was one of the last performances in Music Hall before Covid-19 shut down theaters in mid-March.

According to the announcement, the seven-day multimedia festival will “reflect on the meaning of Mozart’s work and remind audiences of the power of music to bring communities together. It will feature specially curated musical broadcasts, live events, digital content, and a range of programming that illuminates how racism and inequality have shaped classical music, past and present.”

Featuring WQXR’s Terrance McKnight as the nightly host, “Mostly Mozart Festival on WQXR” will begin with a “mashup” of Mozart’s Requiem—the movements he penned himself—seamlessly interwoven with the timeless music of Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, featuring his Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten, the Te Deum, and Mozart-Adagio (Aug. 10, 8 pm ET).

The centerpiece of the festival is a radio documentary about the opera “Blue” (Aug 14, 8 pm ET), which was originally scheduled to have its New York City premiere at Mostly Mozart this summer. “Blue” centers on a Black family in present-day Harlem coming to terms with the sudden death of their teenage son at the hands of a police officer. The documentary will pair exclusive musical highlights from the opera’s debut at the 2019 Glimmerglass Festival, with commentary from its creators, composer Jeanine Tesori and librettist/director Tazewell Thompson as well as musicologist Naomi André. 

There is much more to hear during the festival. Click here to see the full lineup.