Wadsworth receives fond farewell

After a day when it seemed that the world had gone crazy — missile tests in North Korea, unusually heated partisan rhetoric on the morning talk shows, terrorism in a Wichita church — it was restorative to enter Memminger Auditorium on Sunday night. There, friends embraced friends, we listened to some wonderful music, and — not so incidentally — we toasted the long career of Charles Wadsworth.

Wadsworth made his first appearance at Spoleto Festival USA the morning after its opening night in 1977. In the years since, he has supervised more than 900 chamber music concerts, playing the piano in most of them himself. The musicians who think of him as a spiritual father may be numbered in the hundreds, and many of them began their careers here in Charleston.

But this is only part of his legacy. Wadsworth was long associated with the original Spoleto festival in Italy and he was the founder of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.

Moreover, he is a sweet-talking Southern charmer who will remind the more antiquated among us of Sen. Sam Erwin, who led the Watergate investigation in 1973 with delightful Carolina panache.

Now, at the age of 80, Wadsworth has decided that he will step down as artistic director for chamber music at Spoleto Festival USA, to be replaced by Geoff Nuttall, a violinist in the St. Lawrence String Quartet. And so, in the best Charleston style, a party was thrown.

There also was a concert, of course, and a long one, made longer by Wadsworth's affable, rambling onstage comments. But it will not do to complain about our host's loquacity — in fact, I always have suspected that a good number of the people who attend Wadsworth's events come specifically to hear him talk. He may in fact be the funniest classical musician since those grand old comedians such as Victor Borge, Anna Russell and Spike Jones. But when Wadsworth stops talking and starts to play, he is deeply serious about the task. Indeed, he was for many years pretty close to the ideal collaborative pianist, and he is still capable of deeply musical performances.

He did not play in the opening number, a performance of Bach's "Concerto for Two Violins, Strings and Continuo in D Minor," where Ana Maria Fonseca sat in at the keyboard (in this case the harpsichord). The soloists were the husband and wife team of Nuttall and Livia Sohn, and they played with a welcome sense of give and take, an entwined sweetness, at a giddy, happy pace.

Wadsworth then took the stage again to reflect humorously on his future plans ("I'll probably drink a lot more white wine"). He was joined by the violist Hsin-Yun Huang for Maurice Ravel's "Pavane" — marvelously urbane and heartfelt music. Unlike many violists, Huang never sounds like either a disappointed violinist or a cellist "lite." She is at home with the plaintive, burnished tone of her instrument and makes a terrific case for it.

After that, soprano Courtenay Budd, violinist Chee-Yun and flutist Tara Helen O'Connor joined Wadsworth for three of his own works. "Song Without Words" was a stately blues that sounded as though it might have been composed in tandem by Johannes Brahms and George Gershwin. The "Vocalise" is enormously challenging to a singer, but Budd nailed the high notes with the aim of a sharpshooter. The last of Wadsworth's compositions, "Spanish Steps," was enlivened by the sudden appearance of the clarinetist Todd Palmer, who showed off his flamenco dancing skills (I think you had to be there.)

The St. Lawrence String Quartet joined forces with pianist Stephen Prutsman for three immaculately arranged pop numbers. I'm not always a fan of crossover music — in general, jazz needs classical music about as much as a discotheque needs Gregorian chant — but this was so well done that it was easy to make an exception. Prutsman played Irving Berlin's "What'll I Do?" as an introspective solo, coasting along on pure feeling, without a single wasted note.

Those of us who remember the 1970s have a tendency to run and hide if anybody puts on the music we had to suffer through eternally back then. Yelp, yelp, yelp — no Commodores, no Loggins and Messina, no Kansas and (I would have guessed) no Weather Report. But Prutsman startled me with a delicious rendition of Joe Zawinul's "Birdland," which holds up quite wonderfully when stripped of all the quasi-virtuosic noodling that so often makes Weather Report recordings unlistenable. The audience rightly erupted into yet another of the evening's many standing ovations.

Ninety minutes had elapsed before intermission began, and Memminger Auditorium was unusually hot, so I decided to forego the second half of the program, which was devoted to the Piano Quintet by Cesar Franck, with the St. Lawrence Quartet and pianist Jean Yves Thibaudet. And yet I wandered back down Beaufain Street a little later in the evening, to see if the party was still going on. It was, and it continued in houses and restaurants once the official celebration was over.

Quite an evening. Quite a man.