Cara ed amabile

I should be hoarding my stipend and beefing up lecture notes in these last weeks of summer... but the Mostly Mozart festival has begun, and I could not resist its siren call!  As always in the wake of these reckless concert-related decisions, I'm inexpressibly glad I went; surely lecture notes will be the better for my brain and heart having absorbed some Mozart beforehand?   The program notes were unusually lively, as well as informative, maybe stretching a little too far in its attempts to convince us that all the evening's music shared a uniting theme both natural and profound, but still good.  Jane Moss, the festival's director, claims in the program booklet that it is hard to imagine "a more sublime and rewarding way to experience summer in New York than celebrating the genius and inspiration of Mozart," a sentiment which, while perhaps overly fulsome, I find hard to argue with.