Pt. 2 of 2 Reports from the Spoleto Festival
CHARLESTON, SC — For 17 days each summer, the city of Charleston, home of the Spoleto Festival, is bursting with music, dance and drama. This year, as it celebrates its 40th anniversary, the festival offered more events than one could possibly attend. I was in town for just three days and managed to hear three operas and two chamber music concerts. While I didn’t enjoy everything, I was nonetheless impressed with the remarkable variety of entertainment offered and the challenges provided by every performance I attended.
In my first report, I discussed at length the innovative new production of Porgy & Bess, an opera set in Charleston, and premiered in 1935. Another important presentation on the festival calendar was the world premiere of Afram ou la Belle Swita, composed in 1926 by African-American and Charleston native, Edmund Thornton Jenkins. Unfortunately, it didn’t fit into my schedule. I wish that it had. This is an authentic jazz opera that deserves to be widely heard. Performances by Jenkins himself can be heard on a CD set called Black Europe.
I did hear Antoine Dauvergne’s opera La Coquette trompée, written in 1753, a re-worked version of which was presented at the festival under the title, La Double Coquette. Gérard Pesson created a modern version of the opera with some additional music, and updated the libretto to make the show more unconventional. In the original story, a woman disguises herself as a man to court her rival and persuade her boyfriend to come back to her. In Pesson’s version, the jealous woman falls in love with her female rival. It is a delightful three-character French opéra-comique and the mixture of eighteenth-century and twenty-first-century music works surprisingly well. Singers Isabella Poulenard, Mailys de Villoutreys and Robert Getchell were all excellent, and the on-stage orchestra – the period instrument ensemble Amaryllis – played superbly.
The Little Match Girl by German composer Helmut Lachenmann is a very different kind of opera. In fact, it is not really an opera at all. There is very little singing. Instead, we are given mostly shadow puppetry accompanied by a 100-piece orchestra, and a couple of female singers. While it looks like a standard symphony orchestra, the players and vocalists spend most of their time making sound effects both with their instruments and their voices. Lachenmann takes Hans Christian Andersen’s very slight little story, interweaves it with a very dark letter written by a member of the 1980s terrorist group known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang and an even darker excerpt from Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Arundel. In the original story, the poor, freezing little match girl dies and goes to heaven in the loving arms of her grandmother, but in Lachenmann’s distorted version, heaven has become a fearsome nightmare. The Little Match Girl — subtitled “Music with Images” — is one hour and forty minutes long and for me it was akin to torture. The orchestral sounds, while meticulously organised and executed, still had all the expressive appeal of a dripping tap, and the images on the screen, given the digital technology available today, seemed primitive and amateurish. By the way, in addition to the prepared sound effects, the audience had the benefit of the sound of shoes hitting wooden stairs at irregular intervals as audience members beat a path to the exits all through the performance. In retrospect, I wish I had joined them.
In the early days of the Spoleto Festival, first in Italy and later in Charleston, founder Gian Carlo Menotti invited pianist Charles Wadsworth to act as artistic director for a series of chamber music concerts. Wadsworth’s concerts and his spoken introductions are now the stuff of legend. He presided over the chamber music concerts for more than 30 years, retiring only in 2009. His successor, Geoff Nuttall, first violinist of the St. Lawrence String Quartet, has steadily built up his own following.
At the two concerts I attended, Geoff introduced each piece with entertaining anecdotes and often a mini music theory or history lesson thrown in for good measure. In between his stand-up comedy bits, Geoff led the St. Lawrence String Quartet in Fauré’s Piano Quintet (Stephen Prutsman, piano), played duets with his wife, violinist Livia Sohn, and led other ensembles in works by this year’s resident composer, Oswaldo Golijov.
Other performers taking part in the chamber music concerts I attended were pianist Inon Barnatan, violinist Benjamin Beilman, baritone Tyler Duncan, violinist-violist Daniel Phillips, clarinettist Todd Palmer and cellist Alisa Weilerstein. Among the highlights for me was the thrilling, balls-to-the-wall performance of Golijov’s Last Round for double string quartet and double bass. Geoff Nuttall led the ensemble as only he can, with infectious physicality. Star soloist Weilerstein took one of the cello parts and was a fully engaged participant, and Anthony Manzo’s earthy bass playing was sensational. The Dock Street Theater was packed for both concerts.
And what a surprise bonus we got on Wednesday, June 1st; eighty-seven-year-old Charles Wadsworth, the Old Master, was in the house! The grand tradition is alive and well in Charleston, and with Geoff Nuttall at the helm, I suspect that Maestro Wadsworth knows his legacy is in good hands.
For something more…
The St. Lawrence String Quartet has recorded an all-Golijov album which includes Last Round. On the CD the SLQ is joined by the Ying Quartet and bassist Mark Dresser.
For Pt. 1, featuring a report on The Spoleto Festival’s Porgy & Bess, read here.
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