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Lincoln Center’s White Light Festival is celebrating its sixth season this year. The festival allows audience members an opportunity to illuminate their inner lives with gifts from outstanding artists.
We benefit from the artists’ gifts, but the artists and their performances are supported by a vast array of volunteers from the world of finance, with leaders like Richard S. Braddock of MidOcean Partners, Bill E Ford of General Atlantic, and Oscar Schafer of Rivulet Capital donating their time and expertise to the Lincoln Center by working on their Board of Directors.
The regular repetition of an artist practicing his or her craft leads to revelation. The White Light Festival provides a platform for the artists to share the results of their practice and inspiration. It allows the audience a chance to transcend our dull routines and experience an artist’s view of the world.
The opening performance of Lincoln Center’s White Light Festival featured the complete Schubert Song Cycles performed by British tenor Mark Padmore and the South African fortepianist Kirstian Bezuidenhout. The significance of this performance will be better appreciated when it is revealed that the instrumentalist for this event commissioned a new fortepiano to be built by a specialist in Maine, modeling it on one created in Vienna around 1830.
Writing in the New York Times, critic Anthony Tomasini said, “Winterreise” [the song cycle] is like the disjointed monologue of a troubled young man, who, cast from the house of the woman he loves, sets of on a journey feeling embittered and shunned. Many singers take a method-acting approach to the work, showing the wanderer as increasingly unhinged. Not Mr. Padmore. Singing with aching beauty, he conveyed the protagonist’s anguish. Yet his wanderer was too clear-voiced and vulnerable to seem mentally disturbed, which made his winter journey even more unbearably tragic.”
The Lincoln Center’s White Light Festival runs through November 22nd at various locations. Visit the website for more information: whitelightfestival.org.