poignant program on August 15 and 16 explores the intimate relationship between virtuoso musician Clara Schumann, her husband Robert Schumann, and their dear friend Johannes Brahms. The night begins with a pre-concert recital featuring the soprano Susanna Phillips, joined by Louis Langrée in his first Mostly Mozart appearance at the piano. They will perform Robert Schumann's song cycle Frauenliebe und -leben, which the composer wrote during his courtship of Clara. In the main concert that follows, pianist Kirill Gerstein makes his festival debut with Brahms's Variations on a Theme by R. Schumann, an ode that Brahms wrote for his mentor, and Schumann's Piano Concerto in A minor, composed for Clara. The program concludes with Brahms's Symphony No. 1. Gerstein continues the Schumann-Brahms theme in his August 16 late-nightperformance of Brahms's Piano Sonata No. 2, dedicated to Clara, as well as Clara's own Variations on a Theme by R. Schumann.

Following the success of last summer's staged theatrical production The Illuminated Heart, director Netia Jones returns to Mostly Mozart with The Dark Mirror: Zender's Winterreise, an imaginative staging of contemporary German composer Hans Zender's orchestration of Schubert's famous song cycle. Starring the acclaimed tenor Ian Bostridge with the International Contemporary Ensemble, this theatrical production refracts Schubert's wintry trek through Zender's 1993 version and layers it with a Weimar-era aesthetic.

Photo by National Taichung Theater

Ian Bostridge in The Dark Mirror: Zender’s Winterreise

Ian Bostridge in The Dark Mirror: Zender’s Winterreise

"Zender stretches the music, interrupts it, subjects it to filmic procedures of montage and slow motion," wrote Bostridge in The Guardian.