Highs, lows of Spoleto's first 9 days

Halftime!

We are in the middle of the 2009 Spoleto Festival USA, and I thought it might be a good time to take stock. As Henry James observed on the first page of "Portrait of a Lady," part of the afternoon has waned but much of it is left, and what is left is "of the finest and rarest quality."

Well, some of it, anyway.

Gustave Charpentier's "Louise," is playing two more performances at Galliard Municipal Auditorium, one of them tonight and the other Saturday. To the surprise of practically everyone, including myself, "Louise" turned out to be a terrific evening of music theater. That is to say, it is more than a mere string of tunes thrown randomly on the stage: It tells a story, involves us in the lives of its characters and touches the heart.

Charpentier's music is decidedly derivative, but in a weirdly original manner: It sounds as though he had been listening to a lot of different composers (Wagner and Puccini especially) when he sat down to write "Louise," yet he filtered their work through his own distinctive blender. Soprano Stefania Dovhan sang with a sweet ecstasy as the title character, while bass Louis Otey was almost as fine portraying her perplexed and despondent father. Emmanuel Villaume did a masterly job sorting out the opera's complications (it calls for 40 named characters, a full chorus and large orchestra), and the Spoleto Festival USA Orchestra and the Westminster Choir came through brilliantly for him.

There have been two "love 'em or leave 'em" theater works this summer, and one of them is still in residence. I found "Don John," a deliberately raucous, punked-out adaptation of the Mozart-da Ponte opera "Don Giovanni" by Emma Rice, Anna Maria Murphy, Stu Barker and the Kneehigh Theater; intelligent, plausible and sometimes very funny indeed. Other viewers hated it, some of them quite passionately indeed. If you are not disturbed by violence, profanity and pure '70s sleaze — all of which seems to me appropriate for this grim story — you might want to pay a visit to Memminger Auditorium, where "Don John" will be playing almost every night (and several afternoons) through June 7.

The other work that sharply divided audiences was "Story of a Rabbit," written and presented by performers who call themselves Hugh Hughes and Aled Williams, which was presented five times at the Emmett Robinson Theater last week. Those who responded to "Story of a Rabbit" really loved it, and I was sorry not to be able to share in their enthusiasm. I am quite taken by much contemporary British theater — Suzanne Andrade's "Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea" was probably my favorite offering of the 2008 Spoleto Festival — but "Story of a Rabbit" struck me as baggy, disorganized and too cute by half.

My loss? Perhaps. The enthusiasm of the play's advocates is heartening, and I always am happier to hear from audiences that liked something better than I did than from people who hated something I love.

I was a little surprised that the Spoleto powers permitted Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater to present the slick, gushy, elongated and all-but-content-free fundraising film that marred the troupe's visit here last weekend. It seems to me that once an audience member has paid for a ticket, he or she shouldn't have to be bombarded with further commercials for what is about to take place on the stage. In short: Yuck.

I was present Tuesday night when Michael Harrison played his towering piano masterpiece "Revelation: Music in Pure Intonation" — all 75 minutes of it — as part of John Kennedy's Music in Time Series. "Revelation" is the right word (although I sheepishly admit that my colleagues Anne Midgette of The Washington Post, Jeremy Eichler of the Boston Globe and Mark Swed of the Los Angeles Times were on to this amazing musician years ago — how did I get along without Harrison's music for so long?). Music in Time has one more offering this season, a program of works by Per Norgaard and Phillip Bimstein that Kennedy will conduct on Wednesday night.

Remember that you can hear chamber music every day at 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. at Memminger Auditorium. I have griped before about the scanty information released to the public about what, exactly, is being played (the way it works now, a listener merely shows up at the theater to be greeted by a board listing the music and musicians, in much the same way that a fancy restaurant might announce its luncheon specials).

Still, the artists are an extraordinary lot: the radiant soprano Courtenay Budd, the brainy and impassioned pianist Anne-Marie McDermott, the St. Lawrence String Quartet, the much-admired cellist Alisa Weilerstein and the program's founder, pianist and raconteur Charles Wadsworth, among others.

As it happens, Wadsworth is stepping down this year after an involvement with the Spoleto Festival USA that stretches back to its founding in 1977 (and an additional 17 years if you count his association with the original festival in Italy).

A celebration of Wadsworth's life and work is due, and it will take place at 7:30 tonight at Memminger. Tickets doubtless will be hard to come by, but for once I am permitted to tell you what the program will contain — music by Bach, Ravel, Franck (the massive and rarely heard Piano Quintet), some pop arrangements by Stephen Prutsman and three works by Wadsworth himself.