Another fine festival takes a bow

The party's over.

After tonight, the 2009 Spoleto Festival USA Orchestra, which hadn't even held its first rehearsal a month ago, will cease to exist except in the memories of those who were there to play or listen during its few weeks of glory in Charleston.

Members of the Westminster Choir will return home, as will the ardent solo singers who brought Gustave Charpentier's opera "Louise" to bustling life. Spoleto's remarkable troupe of chamber musicians, spent and exhilarated from their last season under the generous leadership of Charles Wadsworth, will scatter throughout the world, where they are likely to meet and make some more magic another day. The Piccolo Spoleto plays and readings will have run their course, and the tourists moved out to the beaches. Full-time Charlestonians will find it much easier to book a table at Hank's or Mercato, High Cotton or Hall's Chophouse. And soon the heat will arrive in earnest.

By the time you read these words, I will be in Manhattan — a rude shock indeed after the past 17 days of gracious, sybaritic ease of Charleston during Spoleto season, where one can forgo taxicabs for bicycle rickshaws, propelled by the strong legs of cheerful young people, exulting in their health and what must be pretty close to the perfect summer job.

I am of an age where every parting holds at least a hint of permanent farewell, and I tend to get especially sentimental on the last day of Spoleto. It was here that I came as the most junior of New York Times critics and later on as the senior critic of The Washington Post. My young children screamed and splashed in the pool of the King Charles Inn, occasionally spraying passers-by on Meeting Street, and it was here that I enjoyed the final family reunion with my parents — never dreaming, of course, that there would come a time when they would no longer be living.

On my last full day in Charleston, I sat with a friend in a Thai restaurant on King Street, listening to a Brian Wilson song blast from the speakers. When I first came to Spoleto in 1984, I had never tried Thai food (it was once considered quite exotic), King Street above Calhoun St. was mostly boarded up and the Beach Boys were widely considered an oldies act. Now Wilson has received the Kennedy Center honors (if he lived in England, he'd be "Sir Brian" now), King Street is bustling night and day, and a widely diverse and discerning crowd knows enough to show up at Basil when it opens to avoid a long wait for a table.

I found myself reflecting on something the composer Philip Glass recently had said to me. "What a time we live in," he reflected. "Traditions are imploding and exploding everywhere — everything is coming together. We have access to cultures that simply weren't available to us even 20 years ago. Think of the way America has changed, of all the new traditions we know about now, from clothing to food to films to martial arts, all of them pretty much unknown when we were growing up. I travel the world, and I'm happy to say that America is still the great melting pot — maybe a chunky stew rather than a melting pot at this point, but you know what I mean."

I do — and the sort of cultural cross-fertilization that the Spoleto Festival offers has changed me, changed Charleston and changed the United States forever. This year, we heard a Ukrainian-American soprano, Stefania Dovhan, sing beautiful French in "Louise." We attended two theatrical presentations from the United Kingdom and, for once, neither of them came from London but rather from Wales ("The Story of a Rabbit" by Hugh Hughes) and from Cornwall ("Don John" by the Kneehigh Theater).

The conductor Emmanuel Villaume, who says jokingly that he lives in airports, maintains residences in Paris and New York, while returning to Charleston every year (2010 will mark his 10th season). The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater visited from New York, but it offered visions shaped by experience in the Deep South, California and Texas; meanwhile, a group called Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet turned out to be based in downtown Manhattan. A farewell tribute to Wadsworth included music by Bach and Franck, but also songs by Dizzy Gillespie and Irving Berlin.

Even the great shock to the Spoleto family this year was decidedly global in its implications. I refer, of course, to the death, in the wreckage of an Air France jetliner traveling from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, of the Brazilian conductor Silvio Barbato, who made his Spoleto Festival debut in 2004, conducting the Italian composer Vincenzo Bellini's "I Capuleti e I Montecchi," a setting of the English playwright William Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet," which was later adapted into the musical "West Side Story" by the Americans Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim.

In short, as the author William Greider put it in the title of a book he published a dozen years ago, we are "One World, Ready or Not."

Sometimes, I dare to hope that humanity just might get itself together. The fact that an American president (indeed, an African-American president) with an internationalist message could be cheered to the rafters by college students in Cairo is an encouraging sign, as is the near-universal condemnation of a paranoid dictator's nuclear ambitions.

Most of us content ourselves with a smaller playing field. In Charleston every year, for 17 days, people from around the world come to meet, meld and share their cultures. It can't hurt, it might help and it is a stimulating delight for a spectator to behold.

On to 2010!