2 days left to experience great music

The 2008 Spoleto Festival USA has almost run its course.

Sunday is the last day before Charleston becomes once more merely the most beautiful and altogether charming city on the East Coast, rather than the most beautiful and altogether C.C.O.T.E.C. that also happens to have a world-class arts festival exploding within its midst.

More reflections on the 2008 festival in Sunday's paper, but let's make the most of what is yet to come.

Don't miss the St. Lawrence String Quartet and Alicia Weilerstein playing the extraordinary "Cello" Quintet by Franz Schubert, at the Memminger Auditorium this afternoon at 1 and Sunday at 11 and 1. Talk about "music of the spheres"!

Today at 1:30, the Taylor Festival Choir will present a program entitled "From the Old Country to the New" at the Circular Congregational Church on Meeting Street.

The program will include a choral cycle by Stephen Paulus, "Poemas de Amor," as well as works by David Maves, Vaughan Williams, Johann

David and Samuel Barber, whose familiar "Adagio for Strings" will be sung in Barber's own transcription for a capella chorus as an "Agnus Dei."

A special incentive ought to be a brand new work by composer and conductor Clare Shore, "Eser Makot" ("Ten Plagues"), set for chorus, three male dancers and amplified viola. Shore describes "Eser Makot" as a "dramatic depiction of the plagues in the book of Exodus which God brought upon Pharaoh and the Egyptians as they held the Israelites captive slaves and refused to let them go.

"The chorus processes and joins the viola and dancers in relating the story in a mixture of free and measured speech, singing and other sounds, much in the manner of an ancient Greek drama."

And then there is the Festival Finale, which takes place Sunday night at Middleton Place at 8:30.

John Kennedy, who has done such an engaging job as a Spoleto artistic associate and in his leadership of the "Music in Time" series, will conduct three works by living American composers, Robert Moran, Philip Glass and Todd Levin, and conclude the whole shebang with Aaron Copland's Symphony No. 3.

Kennedy is one of the heroes of the 2008 festival; another is Emmanuel Villaume, who has served as Spoleto's music director for opera and orchestra since 2001.

Villaume made his American debut here conducting Mozart's "Le nozze di Figaro" in 1990, in the same performance that introduced me to a ravishing young soprano named Renee Fleming, and I've followed his career ever since.

In recent years he has been one of the best things about Washington National Opera, and last fall, he all-but-singlehandedly saved a production of "La Boheme" that had been hampered with unbelievably bleak and dismal staging by making the music sing out more convincingly than ever.

On Thursday night, Villaume led the Spoleto Festival USA Orchestra in a challenging program of familiar 20th century music by Claude Debussy, Bela Bartok and Igor Stravinsky that nevertheless seemed eternally fresh and exciting, as though the ink were still wet.

Much of the credit should go to the marvelous young players, who have been doing a bit of everything this summer — new music, choral masterpieces, opera — and never letting down their part.

It is no wonder that alumni from the program can be found in the best orchestras around the country: Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and the two great dueling bands from New York, the Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra.

Thursday it was finally their turn to take on the big symphonic repertory, and they did not disappoint. Debussy was acutely interested in sonic nuance, he used to say that he wished his piano music could be played by an instrument without hammers, but his orchestral music, for all of its subtlety and shadows, demands immaculate clarity or it can turn to sonic mush.

This was a scrupulous, tidy performance that nevertheless lacked nothing in the way of color or passion. Indeed, there were moments that reminded me of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, a composer I rarely think of when listening to Debussy, but whose "Scheherazade" seemed a clear progenitor on Thursday.

Andrew von Oeyen proved a fierce, brilliant exponent of the Bartok Piano Concerto No. 2. He played with a gigantic tone, tossing off the composer's clusters and counterpoint as though they were child's play — at times, one could have sworn the piano was amplified — but then proved himself capable of rapt tenderness with an encore of Debussy's "Clair de Lune."

Stravinsky made his reputation with his ballet "The Firebird" in 1910, and I'm not sure he ever wrote a better piece.

The "Firebird Suite" (he distilled two of them, in 1919 and 1945; we heard the 1919 version) trims the music by more than half but nevertheless melds the pomp and majesty of Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov with a distinct and ferocious nascent modernism.

Villaume and his troupe delivered a performance of prismatic hues and exhilarating force. This is one of the best orchestras in America right now and it disbands after Sunday night.

Still, we will be hearing from these musicians again and often and all over the place, and it is unlikely that they will ever forget their time in Charleston.

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