On Memorial Day, the last day that Freedom Schooner Amistad was moored in Charleston, I strolled onto the Maritime Center boardwalk just after 4pm, camera at the ready. So less than an hour remained before tours of the historic replica were scheduled to end — and our next Spoleto Festival USA jazz concert was scheduled to begin.
There was no sign of the Spanish slave ship, which commemorates the 1839 mutiny of kidnapped Africans against their captors and their ultimate vindication a year later in the US Supreme Court. Apparently, the latter-day Amistad has a free spirit of its own and does not recognize the shackles of mundane Spoleto brochure texts. Seizing a window of opportunity, the ship had set off to sea a full 20 minutes earlier.
We found a better brand of hospitality onshore and at the festival. When we were late for our 10:30 dinner reservation three nights earlier — a warning not to believe festival estimates for the length of outdoor jazz concerts at The Cistern — staff at the Coast Bar & Grille cordially welcomed us about 15 minutes before their 11pm closing time. Spoleto has demonstrated a cordiality of its own: To accommodate demand for Monkey: Journey to the West, they’re serving up an extra matinee this Thursday.
Of course, behind the smiles and hospitality, anxiety may be lurking. Monkey and Amistad, Anthony Davis’s specially commissioned opera, are selling spectacularly. Carolina Chocolate Drops are sold out for all of their four performances this week, in case you were nurturing a hope of snagging a ticket. But over on Calhoun Street, there’s a discreet partition in the orchestra section at Gaillard Auditorium, betraying a sharp fall-off in ticket sales for Boston Ballet, Geneva Ballet, and the festival production of Rossini’s La Cenerentola. Upstairs in the balcony, the bargain-priced seats seem very well spoken-for.
Blame the economy — or gas prices — if you must. Sue and I saw no diminution of traffic on Meeting Street over the holiday weekend, but crowds along the distinctive open-air mall on Market Street seemed somewhat shrunken. Even more unprecedented: We lucked up on a parking spot there! That enabled us to arrive on time for our dinner reservation at Anson’s, which was bustling as usual but not nearly full. We highly recommend the triggerfish entrée, by the way.
With Monkey triumphing at the box office, the Szechuan earthquake in the news, and the Beijing Olympics on the horizon, China is unusually top-of-mind at Spoleto this year. Excitingly, so is the festival’s future. Dock Street Theatre is draped in tarp, undergoing sorely needed renovations, so the customary theater production running the full duration of the festival had to be scrapped for 2008.
The true hub of Spoleto, Dock should be back in commission for 2010. Less publicized is the construction in progress at the College of Charleston on St. Philip Street, adjacent to the Simons Center, where much of the edgier music and theater are performed. That massive building signals an enormous expansion of the Theatre, Music, and Dance Departments at CofC — and possibly a glorious windfall for Spoleto.
Meanwhile, the wondrously renovated Meminger Auditorium offered festivalgoers a tantalizing first glimpse of the future. With five days of intoxicating Spoleto effervescence left before its Sunday finale, here’s how this year’s festival shapes up (* denotes shows that are still running):
Theater
The Burial at Thebes — With Dock Street now dark, Nottingham Playhouse Theatre Company was compelled to present this update of Sophocles’ Antigone outdoors at The Cistern, a move the ancient Greeks and their gods would have applauded. The flavor of religious ceremony is preserved by director Lucy Pittman-Wallace and designer Jessica Curtis, while the thrust of Seamus Heaney’s idiomatic translation is gently steered toward a denunciation of Bush 42 via the stubborn, arrogant, deviously patriotic King Creon, successor to the brilliant and perverse Oedipus. Original music by Mick Sands puts flute, lute, violin, cello, clarinets, and drum in the hands of the talented ensemble.
The most shattering aspect of this production, however, is the force of Sophocles’ passion through the mouths of this fine cast, including Richard Evans as the vatic Teiresias and Peter Basham as Creon’s son Haemon. Catherine Hamilton is a magnificent Antigone with just the slightest bit of disdain for her moral inferiors, and Paul Bentall is a fearsomely believable Creon. Best Greek drama these eyes have ever seen.
Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea — The 1927 company who present this deliciously zany confection are a perfectly meshed quartet of Londoners. With Lillian Henley at the keyboard and Paul Barritt supplying animated film, our transport back to the Jazz Age and the sanctum of silent movie houses is smooth and convincing. Completing the comedy magic are the two centerstage performers, writer/director/flapper Suzanne Andrade and Esme Appleton, one hilariously irresistible pixie.
Starting off with “The 9 Deaths of Choo-Choo the Cat,” Devil scored with unerring marksmanship in all of its succinct blackout sketches, 65 minutes of bootleg ambrosia. Sadistic, fanciful, and overwrought in the best Max Sennett tradition.
*Monkey: Journey to the West — Originating in Paris with co-production from the Manchester International Festival, Monkey combines pop music, eye-popping costumes, and animation with Chinese opera and acrobatics. Calling upon Chen Shi Zheng (Dark Matter) for direction, Damon Albarn (Gorillaz) for original music, and Jamie Hewlett (Demon Days) for animation, it’s a Zen masterful hybrid beyond the frontiers of anything you’ve ever seen, a Chinese equivalent to Disney and Cirque du Soleil and no less family-friendly.
From the moment Monkey hatches from his animated egg to the moment he meets Buddha in Paradise — in India, if you care to replicate the journey — the significance of our epic superhero’s trials are secondary to their sheer circus wonder. With the aid of English supertitles, we’ve transcended the nonsense language of Cirque without ever feeling weighed down by dramatic suspense or seriousness. Why stop to worry or think when another acrobatic flip, aerial silk choreography, or martial arts display lurks around the next bend?
Due to unforeseen injury, Fei Yang isn’t merely alternating with Li Bo in performing the pranks, tumbles, and animal natterings of Monkey, he’s now sharing the role. With all the eye candy around them, there’s never an awkward moment. Or a boring one.
The Be(A)st of Taylor Mac — With his quaint ukulele and the occasional detour into falsetto, the flaming phenomenon that is Taylor Mac may have taken its inspiration from Tiny Tim. But he definitely doesn’t shop for clothes in the same places or carry a torch for anyone like Miss Vicky — and his makeup kit goes far, far beyond eyeliner.
Mac jubilantly broke the fourth wall and the high-toned Spoleto mold from the moment he entered Emmett Robinson Theatre at Simons Center for one of his late-night, sedition-meets-sequins performances. Perhaps the distinction between Charleston audiences and the drunken dives where he usually serenades wasn’t as sharp as Mac anticipated: An ebullient audience member in our row seemed to be laboring under the delusion that her name was in the program book.
That only increased Mac’s opportunity to demonstrate his poise, wit, and queenly sovereignty. Most outrageous among Mac’s greatest hits was “The Revolution Won’t Be Masculinized,” for which he donned a ginormous set of singing boobs.
Opera
*Amistad — The coming out of Memminger Theatre is a smashing success. Cunningly preserving the large hall’s flexibility, this renovation upgrades the funky qualities that, in its rundown past, made Memminger such a perfect venue for Surrogate Cities and a decadent Don Giovanni. This side of Circle in the Square on Broadway, I don’t know of a blackbox space that’s as spacious or ideally suited for theater.
Wonder of wonders, this flexible funkiness is lavished upon an opera! Anthony Davis’s score — straddling classical and jazz idioms and infused with blues — is funky in its own right, while the poetic libretto of Thulani Davis (Anthony’s cousin) turns the Africans’ freedom fight into a totemic fantasia. But Thulani’s dramatic savvy isn’t as advanced as her lyricism. Because the Trickster God she installs as protagonist has no real impact on the plot, singer Michael Forest struggles to give the deity a personality ñ and cousin Anthony struggles to compose effective music for him.
Far more successful are the Davises’ portraits of Cinque, the leader of the Amistad mutiny and Antonio, the shifty cabin boy whose loyalty goes to whoever has the upper hand. This pair is powerfully sung by Gregg Baker as the liberator and Fikile Mvinjelwa as the lackey. Janinah Burnett has a wonderful aria as Margru in the opening court testimony, narrating her kidnapping, and Mary Elizabeth Williams is majestic as the African Goddess of the Waters. Williams’ heart-wrenching lament, “They Come to Me as if from the Heavens,” carries the full freight of the Diaspora, conceived by the Davises as an oceanic samba.
Stage director Sam Helfrich is fully aboard with a breathtaking utilization of Memminger ñ abetted by set designer Caleb Hale Wertenbaker and lighting designer Peter West. For all its flaws, this is one thrilling, indelible evening of theater and music.
*La Cenerentola — With Monkey here and Amistad there, stage director Charles Roubard and his tech team have answered the challenge at Gaillard Auditorium, where many a static or clunky opera production has resided in the past. We’ve seen edgier productions in this jumbo jet hangar in recent years, but in this year’s Cinderella Italiano, we have animation and movable sets adding excitement to the adventurous choices in repertoire.
The comedy, especially by Jennifer Check and Laura Vlasek Nolen as the evil sisters, plays with the vulgar sparkle of fine Chianti. Tim Nolen, as evil stepfather Don Magnifico, adds even finer singing and vintage mugging. But I’m afraid Victor Ryan Robertson is only intermittently up to the role of the charming Prince Don Ramiro, underpowered most of the evening and obviously saving himself for the high-note highlights.
Sandra Piques Eddy as the title scullery as much better than that — with more demanding fireworks to save herself for. Her wedding day aria is a dazzler.
Dance
Boston Ballet — They came armed with a program that had attractions for balletomanes and contemporary dance fanciers, one of the most impressive dance invasions ever seen at Gaillard. Boston wasted no time firing off its heaviest artillery, leading off with resident choreographer Jorma Elo’s “Brake the Eyes,” an amazing juxtaposition of mechanical, absurdly doll-like movement and the elegant music of Mozart. Wide-eyed principal Larissa Ponomarenko conclusively demonstrated that Wolfgang did not have ballet in mind when he wrote, executing her precise, repetitive, inhuman routines with an aplomb — and humor — that belied their difficulty.
The whole ensemble impressed in this ebullient deconstruct of ballet, really the first troupe at Spoleto since the 1999 performance of Miami City Ballet to merit comparisons with our own North Carolina Dance Theatre. After intermission, they put the conventions back together for a set of excerpts from Pete Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. Without dreamy lakeside scenery, a fairytale palace, or the context of a plot, the spectacle never reached full Russian refinement, despite Ponomarenko and Misa Kuranaga’s exploits as swans in the pas de deux.
Newbies I heard gushing about the Bostonians were most impressed by the energy and athleticism of the finale, Twyla Tharp’s “In the Upper Room.” Perhaps that was because they hadn’t been exposed to pieces presented by the Miamians or the Paul Taylor Dance Company in the same relentlessly blithe vein. Or they were not as numbed as I was by the nine Philip Glass segments this piece was set to.
Ballet du Grand Theatre de Geneve — One of the most abysmal disappointments I’ve experienced at Gaillard, to be blunt. The Genevans totally discarded ballet — and their senses along with it — in opting for three edgy new-millennium choreographies. The first two, Saburo Teshigawara’s “Para-Dice” and Andonis Foniadakis’ “Selon Desir,” were the worst, lacking spark from the dancers, who had little in the way of physical challenge or emotional involvement from the choreographers to ignite them.
Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s “Loin” started far more promisingly with a couple of the guys performing an intriguingly partnered hand-and-arm dance. Additional unisex couples completed the tableau and performed the same dance, standing in a row across the stage. Then they all turned around a full 180 degrees, as if in a square dance, replacing their discarded partners with ones of the opposite sex — and leaving one partnerless man and one partnerless woman at opposite ends of the line. They tried to connect twice, succeeding only when all the other dancers flopped to the floor, a recurring motif.
Unfortunately, Cherkaoui inserted spoken segments in the middle of his provocative concept, delivered by the dancers. I’m at a loss to explain how this ballet company rounded up so many Swiss who speak English so badly. More inexcusable was the absence of feedback supplied to the dancers. By their third performance at Gailliard, they should have adjusted to the hall and made themselves audible. Or they should have been amplified. The same inattention plagued “Desir,” where recordings of Bach’s Passion oratorios were potted too loud by sound engineers.
Jazz
Heloisa Fernandes — You don’t often see a jazz soloist break down and cry in the middle of a performance. But then you rarely hear any music so affecting that you’re not surprised. That was just one aspect of Fernandes’ US debut concert that was astonishing. From the opening selection, which transitioned smoothly from Villa-Lobos’s “Abril” to Jobim’s “Double Rainbow,” she demonstrated formidable virtuosity and magical delicacy.
On her own “Voo,” Fernandes showed she has absorbed Chick Corea’s power Spanish mode as fully as his softer “Children’s Songs” side. There were also passages of Chopinesque grandeur reminiscent of Keith Jarrett’s finest ruminations. But it was during “Crianca,” Fernandes’ plaything for her own children (tinged with premonitions of love and death), that the tears began to form in the pianist’s eyes. Spoleto impresario Michael Grofsorean has unearthed a true Brazilian gem here. I’m betting she’ll be back.
Daniel Mille — After suffering through bandoneon player Dino Saluzzi last year, accompanied by a droning cello, I was a little leery of another excursion into the world of accordion. Mille does things on his all-button instrument that I’d never seen before, including percussion and vibrato. And have you ever heard any instrument sound like the ocean’s waves? Sue enjoyed the range of Mille’s facial expressions as he played his own unabashedly romantic compositions. I was more enchanted by the vocalise that he layered on.
Once again, there was a cello in the combo. But Eric Longsworth mostly plucked his instrument like an upright bass — interspersed with percussion of his own in nearly every bar. Stephane Chausse rounded out the trio, doubling on clarinet and bass clarinet. He was able to kick-start Mille’s dreamy tempi into swinging 4/4 on either instrument. In fact, my favorite Mille original, “Place St. Catherine,” shuttled engagingly between 4/4 and a leisurely 3/4 waltz.
Paula West — There’s little musical virtuosity or originality in this chanteuse’s traversal of the songbook nor any great emotional depth in her exploration of the lyrics. But the voice is gorgeous, and West scores points for singing the rarely-heard verses of Rodgers & Hart’s “Bewitched,” Romberg & Hammerstein’s “Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise,” and Hammerstein’s lyrics for Jerome Kern’s “Why Was I Born?”
Pianist George Mesterhazy’s arrangements are a definite asset, enabling West to venture effectively into Bob Dylan territory with “Like a Rolling Stone” and “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.” His solos, however, were a hackneyed uninspired liability until about the eighth song in the set, and I wished he had yielded the balance of his playing time to guitarist Ed Cherry. Aside from the Kern and Romberg tunes already mentioned, West and her quartet clicked best on Oscar Brown’s “The Snake” and Luis Bonfa’s “Sweet Happy Life” from Black Orpheus.
“Gimme a Pigfoot,” a staple for blues belters stretching back to Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday, marked the spot where Mesterhazy finally roused himself from autopilot and locked in. Made a huge difference.
Stefano “Cocco” Cantini — Clearly a disciple of John Coltrane, soprano saxophonist Cantini mostly drinks from the well of music that came after Trane’s signature quartet. Not the refreshing waters most listeners would choose to drink. Beginning with chameleonic pianist Vanburto Ciamaruti, the European sidemen “Cocco” brought with him for his American debut are a different matter.
To open, Cantini flashed his Trane creds with a wild solo that included a telltale “My Favorite Things” quote. Then Ciamaruti played more piano in his first two minutes in The Cistern spotlight than Mesterhazy had played all evening long, fusing the influences of Corea and McCoy Tyner in a synthesis all his own. It wasn’t until the first encore, a searing 90 minutes later, that Ciamaruti managed his most impressive feat: with the lights dimmed, he actually calmed Cantini down in a tender, expressive duet.
Till then, the most domesticated sounds from Cantini came in a composition that reminded me of Trane’s recording of Frank Loesser’s “The Inch Worm.” I thought that I’d erased that dud from my memory.
Classical
*BofA Chamber Music — Over the last few years, chamber music host Charles Wadsworth has gradually overhauled his stable of guest artists. Less than half are recognizable from 20th Century Spoleto, including flutist Tara O’Connor and her violinist spouse Daniel Phillips, clarinetist Todd Palmer, pianist Stephen Prutsman, and half of the St. Lawrence String Quartet.
Wadsworth hasn’t merely reloaded the vacant slots. He has brought in bassoonist Peter Kolkay and pre-eminent French hornist Eric Ruske, adding fresh colors to the palette and allowing the series to explore new repertoire. Most notable of these was Schubert’s Octet in F for horn, bassoon, clarinet, contrabass, and string quartet. Grand music. A couple of subtle evolutions were on display at that performance, itself a landmark in Wadsworth’s view.
Following the model of the esteemed Emerson Quartet, St. Lawrence leader Geoff Nuttall now alternates the first violin chair with Scott St. John. Meanwhile, Wadsworth is following a similar model, sharing hosting chores with Nuttall, who has been elevated to the associate artistic directorship of the series. Pssst … he seems to know a little more about the music and the composers he introduces — or he’s less inclined to keep it a secret.
There’s no letdown in virtuosity when you listen to the 2008 roster, and the choice of repertoire may be slightly more adventurous than usual. But Memminger is not as friendly a site for chamber music as it is for opera, and adjustment by the soloists and Wadsworth is a work-in-progress. The reverberant acoustic dulled the edges of cellist Alisa Weilerstein’s performance of Barber’s Cello Sonata and Phillips’ brave solo traversal of Bach’s Chaconne. Similarly, I’d much rather hear tenor Paul Groves’ rendition of Vaughan Williams’ On Wenlock Edge after the series moves back to Dock Street in 2010.
Memminger is more conducive to French horn, so it’s serendipitous for Ruske to be playing such a prominent role this year. We heard him in four of the five concerts we attended, most memorably in Brahms’s Horn Trio and a Dohnanyi sextet. But all of the music is choice, particularly for anyone wishing to dip a toe into chamber music for the first time.
*Music in Time — Series director John Kennedy has loosened up in recent years, taking down the “For Elitists Only” sign from the entrance to the Simons Center Recital Hall. Sue especially dreaded entering this clean-room environment with its promised assaults of percussion and atonality, but this year has been a healing experience.
Even before the soothing sounds of Fernandes and Mille, from the Wachovia Jazz series, softened and humanized the space, there was a non-toxic Program I at the 2008 Music in Time, “Music of Anthony Davis.” A very warm family affair, as it turned out. The composer of Amistad was on hand to introduce these more bite-sized morsels — and to delve more deeply into his opera’s beauties.
Sitting down at the keyboard, Davis played his “Goddess Variations,” based on the climactic Act 2 aria sung by the African Goddess of the Waters. He was also on hand to introduce and accompany his wife, soprano Cynthia Aaronson-Davis, on “Lost Moon Sisters,” a song set to the poetry of Diana di Prima.
More family followed. Young Jonah Davis, the composer’s son, sang “Mama Help Me” from another Davis opera, X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X. To conclude the late afternoon smorgasbord, percussionist Gerry Hemingway and clarinetist JD Parran, cohorts in Davis’s jazz combo, lent their virtuosity to You Have the Right to Remain Silent, a concerto notable for Parran’s swinging exploits on contrabass clarinet (including elephantine harmonics), Hemingway’s brushwork and vocalise, as well as its inevitable political thrust.
*Intermezzi — These late afternoon concerts at St. Matthews Lutheran Church are less adventurous and intimidating than their Music in Time counterparts. Intermezzo I was downright reposeful, beginning with Copland’s arrangement of Appalachian Spring for 13 instruments. Less interesting — or should I say more mainstream? — were Mozart’s Symphony #36 and a section of Webern’s arrangement of Bach’s A Musical Offering.
But Intermezzi doesn’t always go with the tried and true. On our return the following Sunday, we enjoyed a tuba concerto by Vaughan Williams as well as the composer’s more familiar The Lark Ascending. The seditious John Kennedy was at the podium leading the creme de la creme of the Spoleto Festival USA Orchestra, so naturally he slipped an even more outré offering, Ingram Marshall’s Orphic Memories, into the program.
Members of that same sterling Spoleto ensemble of young professionals were upfront for the solo sections of the VW concertos. Aubrey Foard was revelatory behind the heavy metal in the Tuba Concerto while violinist Brittany Boulding was no less deserving of her bows as the fluttering, ethereal lark. Surely the harpist was intended to personify Ingram’s Orpheus, but she received no mention in the program, and Kennedy unforgivably neglected to offer her a bow.
The series takes another unexpected turn when soprano Mary Elizabeth Williams and bass-baritone Gregg Baker, standouts in Amistad, take their places at the 5pm Intermezzo IV this Wednesday. Wish I could be there.
This article appears in Jun 4-10, 2008.
