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. Read More

'Modern' music escapes definition

Throughout much of the 1980s, I was the host of a radio program on New York's WNYC-FM that played a lot of contemporary music. One afternoon, however, I devoted an hour to works by the 12th-century composer Perotin - spare, ethereal yet startlingly intense vocal compositions based on the sound (fairly rare in Western music) of stark parallel fourths. Read More

Mature Chang lets self-expression emerge

Sarah Chang has come a long way from her beginnings as a brilliantly virtuosic child prodigy who dazzled audiences with the speed, strength and sonority of her early performances in the mid-1990s. I was all but alone among critics in finding those long-ago concerts empty and meaningless studies in aggression, endowed with neither warmth nor charm. Read More

Time to tell it like it was

Mayor Joe Riley offered a moving tribute to pianist and Spoleto Festival USA artistic director for chamber music Charles Wadsworth the other night. Read More

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. Read More

New styles of music genuinely artistic

Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet - which, despite the bucolic name, is based in New York City rather than the northern Midwest - offered some of the most musically responsive, physically demanding and intellectually satisfying dancing I've seen Saturday afternoon at Galliard Municipal Auditorium. Read More

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." Read More

Orchestra sparkles in 'Das Lied'

What an extraordinary experience it must be for a young person to have practiced and perfected the playing of a beloved instrument, to have won hometown (or even home state) recognition as an accomplished soloist, and then to come to Charleston and team up with other brilliant young musicians as part of the Spoleto Festival USA Orchestra. Read More

Piccolo has a power, pull of its own

Charleston is twice-blessed at this time of year. The Spoleto Festival USA may present most of the "big-ticket" items, but the Piccolo Spoleto Festival, produced and directed by the city of Charleston Office of Cultural Affairs, is equally capable of startling and capturing a visitor. Read More

'Revelation' lives up to name

I visited the Spoleto Festival USA for the first time in 1984, and I've come back as often as I could thereafter. I can remember many magnificent performances (Gian Carlo Menotti's 1991 staging of Mozart's "Nozze di Figaro" with a radiant young soprano named Renee Fleming haunts me still) and, yes, a few tepid ones. But never, until Tuesday afternoon at the Simons Center Recital Hall, had I encountered an unexpected masterpiece by a contemporary composer of whom I'd never heard. Read More

Ailey dancers offer timeless show

The company known as Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater has outlived its founder now by almost 20 years, yet it is no insult to Ailey's hand-chosen successor, the redoubtable Judith Jamison, to suggest that the troupe is still faithful to his spirit. It was in town this weekend - it is almost always in one town or another, having danced throughout the world and in all but two of the 50 states - and Galliard Municipal Auditorium was filled to capacity Sunday afternoon with an audience that came to cheer. Read More

'Don John' brash, 'Rabbit' trash

Emma Rice's "Don John," a brash, bawdy and vastly entertaining gloss on the Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart-Lorenzo da Ponte operatic masterpiece "Don Giovanni," is one of the triumphs of the 2009 Spoleto Festival USA. It will be playing through June 6 at Memminger Auditorium and can be recommended to all but the most innocent and most squeamish spectators. Read More

Gamble on 'Louise' pays off

Spoleto Festival USA took a major gamble in selecting Gustave Charpentier's "Louise" as its principal operatic offering this year. It is neither a box-office favorite, like "La Boheme" or "Carmen," nor is it a newly discovered gem that will bring critics and musical scholars from around the world to Charleston. Read More

Glorious overload of the senses

Festival proved a wonderful ride

They used to say that the great jazz cornet player Bix Beiderbecke died from 'too much of everything.' I'm feeling a little bit that way right now myself after a 17-day immersion in the offerings of the 2008 Spoleto Festival USA.
Read More

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. Read More