Some of this year's European music festivals have begun their Mozart celebrations early.

That hardly makes them less honorable or desirable than those with full-blown Mozart celebrations.

Mostly Mozart (July 28 to Aug. 26) will be a linchpin of New York's Mozart celebration, trying to put a fresh spin on the composer's work.

The last two concerts in the venerable Guarneri Quartet's Mozart celebration at the Metropolitan Museum are on Feb. 25 and April 8.

The biennial event returns with a Mozart celebration.

Apart from a nod to Lincoln Center's continuing Mozart celebration, with the composer's four-square Symphony No. 17, the program leans heavily toward the colorful and the atmospheric.

The exhibition cannot stay open longer because many of the 843 items on display are needed for Mozart celebrations elsewhere.

The Mozart celebration would be put aside for another century and this year would be dedicated to honoring the composer of "The Times They Are a-Changin'."

Even if they had wanted to plan ahead, they could not have anticipated how ripe the climate would be for a Mozart celebration on the 200th anniversary of the composer's death.

This year's Mozart celebrations, for all their numbing repetition of the overfamiliar, will in the end have afforded lasting insights into the composer's development.