Highlights: 30th Anniversary
August 23, 2011
Barnyard Follies
By: Robert Johnson for The NJ Star Ledger
NEW YORK—The hot ticket at this summer’s Mostly Mozart Festival is a pass to see the Mark Morris Dance Group, whose annual appearances at the festival have only whetted the audience’s appetite for more.
This year’s program, which opened at the Rose Theater on Thursday, is so charming and so deep that one could return again and again.
Framing the evening are two dances curiously related. The musical scores for “Le Renard,” by Stravinsky, and Satie’s “Socrates” were originally commissioned by the same patron, and both feature elaborate, vocal texts. Both works, moreover, conclude with a scenario in which the death penalty is administered dispatching a threat to public order. There the similarities end, however.
