Mostly Mozart Tonight on KCET

In the 1984 screen adaptation of Peter Shaffer’s “Amadeus,” director Milos Forman and actor Tom Hulce offered up a provocative vision of Mozart as the preening, willful equivalent of a present-day rock star--a periwigged Mick Jagger, grooving to his own version of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.”

Think what you will about that depiction, but it turned Mozart into a modern-day celebrity and got a lot of people listening to his music who might not otherwise have done so.

Among the movie’s key musical references was the Requiem that Mozart was writing at the time of his death in 1791 at age 36. That unfinished work is also the centerpiece of tonight’s “Live From Lincoln Center” performance, presented via tape delay on KCET at 8 p.m.

The New York concert is part of Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival and features Gerard Schwarz, the festival’s music director, conducting one of his final programs as he leaves his post of 17 years. Before the Requiem, pianist Emanuel Ax is scheduled to play the Piano Concerto No. 22 in E flat, K. 482.

At 10 p.m., KCET will rebroadcast the Mozart segment of 1999’s “Great Composers” series, in which commentary (much of it attempting to separate Mozart-ian truth from legend) is interspersed with selections from the operas “The Marriage of Figaro” and “Don Giovanni,” the Symphonies 1, 31, 40 and 41, and more.

In the end, you can decide which characterization of Mozart most suits you. But there’s no quibbling about the music, which still leaves the listener feeling, as one contemporary of Mozart’s put it, “out of breath, for hardly has he grasped one beautiful thought than another of greater fascination dispels the first.”