Spoleto-goers needn't break the bank to enjoy festival offerings

It's easy to spend a lot of money at the Spoleto Festival — easy, that is, if you have the money to spend. I'm one of the luckiest people in Charleston right now, as The Post and Courier pays for my tickets as part of my contract here. Still, along with the costlier Spoleto seats — admission to Rossini's "La Cenerentola" ranges from $20 all the way up to $110 — there are any number of events taking place that will not set you back even a penny.

Take the splendid Piccolo Spoleto series entitled "L'Organo" — "The Organ" — which presents a concert each weekday morning at 10 a.m. at houses of worship all over the city (venues include the Cathedral of St. Luke and St. Paul, St. John's Lutheran Church, St. Matthew's Lutheran Church, St. Michael's Episcopal Church and Kahal Kadosh

Beth Elohim Synagogue). The music ranges from Johann Sebastian Bach to transcriptions from the avant-garde rock band Radiohead with works by most of the significant keyboard composers larded in between.

I was particularly taken with a program that took place last week at the First (Scots) Presbyterian Church, a beautiful and spacious edifice on Meeting Street just a little south of Broad. Michael McGhee, assistant professor of music at Wesleyan College in Georgia, was the organist, and he offered a program of considerable variety.

A cheery, chipper "Procesion Alegre" ("Happy Procession") by Garry A. Cornell, an American composer based in Ohio, began the morning on a bright note — or, rather, on hundreds of them. McGhee then turned to Bach — still the absolute center of the organ repertory — with a appropriately exultant rendition of the Fugue in C (BWV 564).

Of all the great composers, Bach was the least concerned with the actual sound of his music. Indeed, he was one of the premiere self-transcribers of all time. He happily and successfully rearranged his violin concertos for the keyboard — and recycled choruses into orchestral sinfonias. It was all one to Bach; his concern was with melody and structure, rather than timbre, and this is the reason his music survives a multiplicity of processing. Bach's compositions sound just fine on the synthesizer, in versions for a capella jazz chorus, in arrangements for saxophone quartet.

The American journalist and lexicographer H.L. Mencken once fashioned a series of tiny prose poems purporting to sum up the musical aesthetics of various composers. Some of these were pretty fanciful: to Mencken, Beethoven evoked "the glory that was Greece ... the grandeur that was Rome ... a laugh" while Debussy's work called to mind "a pretty girl with one blue eye and one brown eye." Perhaps the best — and certainly the most elegant — of these encapsulations was the one provided for Bach: "Genesis 1:1," Mencken wrote, and let it stand.

Charles Wesley's "God Save the King (with New Variations)" was an unexpected treat, full of flourishes and filigree. The "Irish Air from County Derry," much better known as "Danny Boy," has become so familiar that certain New York bars now ban it on St. Patrick's Day. Bad idea: If the melody is played without undue indulgence or sentimentality — as it was by McGhee, in Edwin H. Lemare's arrangement — it remains one of the most ineffably poignant songs in the repertory. (The music of Stephen Foster often is ruined in the execution, too, but when it is played with restraint and dignity, it is one of the glories of American culture.)

The sole questionable performance was of an arrangement of Samuel Barber's "Adagio for Strings," which has taken on the stature of America's more-or-less official mourning music in recent years. It originally was written for string quartet, but Barber later expanded the piece (and slowed it way down) to be played by all the violins, violas, cellos and basses in a large orchestra. On the organ, however, for all of McGhee's skill (and some wonderful low notes from the lowest registers of the instrument) it calls to mind the perfumed parlor of a funeral home, and I was happy to have it over with.

Another admirable freebie is the Piccolo Spoleto American Film Festival, presented at the main branch of the Charleston County Public Library on Calhoun Street. Last week, the films were all by John Huston — "The Maltese Falcon," "The Asphalt Jungle," "The Misfits," "The Night of the Iguana" and the director's last film, "The Dead," an achingly tender setting of the concluding story in James Joyce's first masterpiece, "Dubliners."

"The Dead" is not yet available on DVD in the United States, and the library's VHS copy of the film had any number of imperfections. Nevertheless, it was grand to see Huston's evocation of 1904 Dublin on a screen larger than a television set — and what astonishingly vivid and eloquent faces he found to people his farewell!

Next week, the festival offers a series of "Movies About Movies" — "The Player" on Monday; "Sunset Boulevard," probably the best film ever made about Hollywood, on Tuesday; "The Bad and the Beautiful" on Wednesday; the hilarious and prescient "Wag the Dog" on Thursday and the original version of "Cinema Paradiso" on Friday. The programs are coordinated by Sara Breibart and they start promptly at 1:30 p.m.

The Post and Courier has a complete list of Spoleto and Piccolo Spoleto offerings every day; you also can look things up online by going to www.spoletotoday.com. And don't forget that a walk through Charleston — with its crowds, homes, alleyways, history and hiding places — is always free and might just be the festival's most eloquent work of art. Lose yourself in it.