With our Charlotte Symphony reeling, the Baltimore Opera in bankruptcy, New York’s JVC Jazz Festival cancelled, and the Met Opera cutting back on scheduling, our annual pilgrimage to Charleston over the Memorial Day weekend took on a new urgency. Sue and I wanted to make sure that Spoleto Festival USA was still there!
You bet it is. With one less venue and only one opera on this year’s 17-day schedule, there was clear evidence of prudent belt-tightening by festival organizers. But nothing drastic. The number of events listed in the brochure shrank 11.3 percent to 133, and the brochure itself was pruned by 10 percent from 40 to 36 pages. Subtler yet, those pages, still oversized at 9×12″, were reduced in area by 23 percent.
Fewer available tickets seemed to translate into fuller houses at the events we attended. Back rows at Gaillard Auditorium were partitioned and out of play for the opening night of Louise — as they had been throughout last year’s Spoleto. But those partitions came tumbling down for the mighty Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, celebrating their 50th anniversary, and those back rows were nearly sold out for both the performances we attended.
Whether it was a lunchtime chamber music concert or a late afternoon contemporary recital, holiday weekend or the Tuesday after, there were no sparse crowds, and nearly all were close to capacity. Even after a vicious headline on the front page of the Charleston Post & Courier, people were overflowing Emmett Robinson Theatre for the final performance of Story of a Rabbit.
Holiday traffic trended upwards as predicted from what we saw, and the day after we returned to Charlotte, The Broadway League announced that the 2008-09 season ending on May 24 was the highest-grossing ever. So you see, amid the Bush-Cheney recession there is still some good news if you pay attention.
Here’s how I saw the first five days of Spoleto:
Theater
• Don John — It isn’t mere coincidence that Kneehigh Theatre’s first visit to Charleston in 2006 with their production of Tristan & Yseult occurred during Spoleto Festival USA’s reprise of Don Giovanni, the Mozart opera that provides the story line for Kneehigh’s current Spoleto seduction. Günter Kramer’s lushly environmental staging of Giovanni, remounted in Charleston after its highly acclaimed Festival premiere in 2005, reportedly inspired Kneehigh director/adaptor Emma Rice’s John — and there’s an unmistakable Spoleto imprint upon it.
Kramer’s Don cavorted in bucolic wantonness reminiscent of the ancient days of the Roman Empire — or innumerable paintings from the Renaissance onwards. But when Giovanni’s trusty valet, Leporello, attempted to dissuade the jilted Elvira from pursuing his insatiable master, he had more than a list of the libertine’s 2065 conquests. He had Polaroids!
So does John’s sidekick, Nobby — plus a perpetually loaded camera that’s ready to spit out more instant photos of fresh conquests. Here the photo equipment isn’t anachronistic, for Rice has transposed the action to the pre-Thatcher UK in some unspecified grimy industrial backwater.
When the band isn’t playing Stu Barker’s original music or pitching in with stagehand chores, they’re huddled with a shambling quartet of choristers around a flickering campfire built inside a metal drum, looking like unemployed — or striking — laborers. Their only entertainments are the outpourings of an old transistor radio and the adventures of Don John unfolding above and around them.
Anna, tethered in marriage to Vicar Derek and in duty to her invalid father, goes home to a boxcar that slides down from the upstage. The climactic scene where John rapes Anna and murders her father literally unfolds as the stage crew peels apart the three front walls of the boxcar so that they become extensions of its floor.
Like Robert Frost’s humble “Oven Bird,” Rice’s deglamorized Don asks us over and over what we should make of diminished things. For John doesn’t cavalierly warn Anna’s father against dueling with him before running him through as Giovanni did. After stripping Dad of his gun, John kills him with it in cold blood — doing Anna a favor to his drugged, besotted way of thinking. In the denouement, Father comes back Commendatore-like in a soldier’s uniform to stretch out his hand to John. But unlike Mozart’s fearsome statue-come-to-life, this reanimated corpse lacks the power to drag John down into hell. Instead, a few letters light up in the tawdry carnival sign that overarches the action, indicating we’re already there.
Carnival lights strung across the downstage come into play as Alan, the latter-day Masetto, plans his wedding to Zerlina. A flickering bulb nearly gets Alan electrocuted — twice — and veteran Kneehigh actor/writer Carl Grose milks the physical comedy with the grace of a Keystone Cop. When the slutty Zerlina salves Alan’s wounds, after a brutal thrashing from Don John deep in Act 2, Patrycja Kujawska’s punkish, Polish mothering brings us closest to Mozart’s comic spirit.
Dense accents such as Kujawska’s impel us at times to watch Don John like a foreign opera without supertitles. Iceland native Gisli Orn Gardarsson brings a tall, lean, Cheyenne Jackson physicality to Don John’s debauchery and dissipation, but Rice wisely limits his lines as he collects his trophy panties. The verbiage void is partially filled in by Dom Lawton, who narrates as a Paperboy between his lead vocals. Mike Shepherd flits nervously around as Nobby, a needier case than Leporello. Masquerading as John, Nobby suffers the more degrading humiliation. Capped by a flash of his Polaroid, of course.
Like the nebishy Alan, starchy Derek offers John scant competition. American lit students might ignore Don Ottavio and view Craig Johnson’s hand-wringing ineffectuality more as a latter-day Reverend Dimmesdale as he works out of his mini house trailer church. There is much to ponder when Rice has Nina Dogg Filippusdottir, instinctual yet principled as Anna, wear a blouse stained with her father’s blood long after her midnight misadventure. Anna thought — or wanted to think — that it was her husband blindfolding and ravishing her. That bloody blouse encourages us to think of her shame in Scarlet Letter terms.
As for Elvira’s unquenchable obsession with John, Amy Marston may remind you of Edvard Munch’s iconic Scream. Modernity hangs heavy on this Mozart makeover, with none of the romantic chemistry retained by Tristan & Yseult, and it isn’t pretty. Don John mesmerizes with its tawdry, vivacious style, occasionally hilarious but always deliciously dark. (Through June 7)
• Story of a Rabbit — Greeting every member of the audience as they entered the theater, writer/performer Hugh Hughes was ingratiating even before his Story began. Nor did he retreat into a shell after he and his diffident tech partner, Aled Williams, began their narrative. Hughes cordially served tea to one lucky ticketholder at the beginning of the show and to another at a convenient resting spot.
Our host waxed philosophical at several points in his story and geometrical at others. Along with lights and AV equipment, Aled picked up a guitar and sang two or three intentionally horrid songs. Visual aids used by Hughes during his tale were similarly cheesy: a clay rabbit, a telephone, and a doll that alternately represented himself and his father in assorted demos.
Actually, two stories weirdly intersected, both dealing with DEATH, the word conveniently projected on the upstage screen as the show began. The main story was really the death of Hugh’s father and Hugh’s hurried, confused journey to the funeral. Hugh’s brief stewardship of a neighbor’s rabbit was secondary — but fatal! — connecting surreally with the funeral narrative at a key moment.
While it was consistently entertaining to grapple with the question of whether we were dealing with a simpleton or a condescending wise guy, Rabbit hopped over its opportunity to powerfully break through the fourth wall. That could have been accomplished if Hughes had given us a better glimpse of who his father was and the uniqueness of their relationship. Like the geometric diagram on the flip pad helping us to ponder the mystery of his father’s last moments on earth, the core of Hughes’ confessional remained two-dimensional.
Opera
• Louise — Composer/librettist Gustave Charpentier’s story is simple enough. Our poet hero Julien has written to the father of his dear Louise, beseeching the hand of his darling daughter in marriage. Dad and Mom, both wholesome blue-collar types, despise Julien’s unindustrious Bohemian profession almost as much as his raffish Parisian lifestyle. When neither Julien’s courtesy nor Louise’s ardent entreaties are enough to secure Pappa’s blessing, Louise keeps her promise and elopes with her serenading poet — until she learns from a distraught Mamma that her departure has made Dad gravely ill. Louise’s folks still want to possess and dictate to their daughter, but love and the irresistible lure of Paris are victorious.
A thin storyline for a four-act opera, no doubt, and Charpentier isn’t nearly as adept at infusing the glamour of Paris into his plot as Puccini’s La Boheme, evolved from an Henri Murger novel by a pair of skilled librettists. More annoying is Charpentier’s counterintuitive insistence that Louise’s parents live in the Paris they despise, close neighbors of the infatuated Julien. So the couple must elope away to their Parisian love nest, but not so far that Mamma cannot easily find them.
That might be a little disorienting to first-time viewers who haven’t confirmed these geographical anomalies in a detailed synopsis beforehand — or perused stage director Sam Helfrich’s illuminating program notes. Unfortunately, the Spoleto singers and design team aren’t consistently successful in executing Helfrich’s concept.
Set designer Andrew Cavanaugh Holland spreads the parents’ apartment — flatly and drably — across nearly the entire Gaillard Auditorium stage. Then the entire family huddles in wee corner, none visible full face to the audience, around a table barely sufficient for serving cocktails at a sidewalk cafe. To make Louise’s homelife even more stifling, bass baritone Louis Otey sings the father’s music with an unrelenting mix of gruffness and querulousness, compressing the arc of his development. Barbara Dever gives us a more three-dimensional portrait of the less-sympathetic Mom but without quite the same vocal purity we hear from Otey.
Loyalties to family and the yearnings of the heart are far too heavily weighted against Louise’s family. Nor does the oppressiveness of home disappear when Act 2 transports us to an outdoor scene in Montmartre, for the drab apartment scenery only folds partially away, and Father sits silently in dim light like a mourner throughout the scene. What lightens everything are the bright colors that the Spoleto Festival USA Orchestra and conductor Emmanuel Villaume sprinkle into this sepia-toned Paris with their adoration of the score.
Stefania Dovhan, making her US operatic debut, is the other thread of excellence in this production from beginning to end, the intoxication of her powerfully fruity soprano enhanced by her impish vitality and blushing ardor. As Julien, tenor Sergey Kunaev matches Dovhan’s vocal beauty — particularly in the joyous, post-coital duet that opens Act 3 — but he wasn’t always as seductively creamy in tone on opening night.
The glorious musical flowering of Act 3, where Louise is crowned Muse of Montmartre after her love duet with Julien, serves as rich compensation for the dreary tedium that precedes. Transition from love nest to Gay Paree is the tech and scenic highlight of the evening, climaxed by Louise’s surreal entrance to her coronation. More lagniappe? Brace yourselves for the Spirit of Paris, alias the Noctambulist, resplendently sung by tenor David Cagelosi with a bright satin costume to match his bravura. (Through June 6)
Dance
• Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre — For their fifth go-round at Spoleto since 1979, Ailey American Dance brought two programs to entice the faithful, one of them a retrospective celebrating the company’s 50th anniversary that included choreographies by the founder from the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s. Both programs were comprised entirely of backward glances to 1988 and beyond, so anyone wishing to see what Ailey and current artistic director Judith Jamison have been up to in the 90s or the new millennium picked the wrong weekend to peep in on the troupe.
Disappointment was almost impossible to find amid the audience buzz at intermissions or after the perennial finale, Ailey’s Revelations suite from 1960. Ailey fans are obviously content to journey backward to a world of bee-boppers, parasols, and Sunday meetin’s, leaving behind a dance landscape influenced by hip-hop, MTV, and Shaq O’Neill. When the Aileys weave their spell, it’s easy to see why. Of all the world-class troupes that have paraded through Spoleto in the past two decades, the Ailey American Dance Theatre alone comes equipped with the technical prowess that enables them to ascend the same lofty pedestal occupied by our own NC Dance Theatre. Yet their vocabularies and styles are utterly different.
The tastiest morsels over the Memorial Day weekend were those in Blues Suite — especially the “Backwater Blues” pas de deux danced by Renee Robinson and Glenn Allen Sims. In the retrospective program, I found special pleasure in the “Scherzo” excerpt from Streams, danced by Amos J. Machanic, Jr., and Abdur-Rahim Jackson; the “Of Love” section of Hidden Rites, danced by Khilea Douglas and Willy Laury; and the “Fix Me, Jesus” pas de deux from Revelations, danced by Gwynenn Taylor Jones and Machanic.
• Hiroaki Umeda — Wedged between the two Ailey programs, this edgy Japanese performer stepped in and provided me with my hip-hop fix for the weekend. More unsettling than receiving hip-hop via a Far Eastern channel were the S20 soundtracks Umeda assaulted us with, synchronized to rather elemental video and lighting effects. Lights were potted up at a glacial pace in “while going to a condition” as Umeda transitioned from motionlessness to dance with equal sluggishness. Then a progressively more elaborate series of simple strobe-like effects on the projection screen, each keyed to its own percussion signature. During this progression, Umeda’s choreography also built in stages, beginning with foot and leg movements, proceeding to arm movements, and finally layering on head action.
Most of the percussion was benign — or even cute — but when parallel fluorescent bars spanned the Emmett Robinson stage, there was a sudden jolt of sound that vibrated the hall and the audience, a sensation akin to electric shock. I must say that, as the experience wore on, I found it fascinating that my dread of the sound bursts grew at first as their onset became predictable, then receded and vanished as my senses became numbed by the repetition in 4/4 time. Umeda and S20 were able to re-establish the impact of the sonic jolt at the end of the piece, so that the arc of it might be conceived as simulating an evolution from Big Bang to A-Bomb.
“Haptic” featured more colorful lighting and less hostile sound, both pluses. But there was no detectable progression or arc to the choreography — nor any discernible connection between action and title. Quirks that had seemed unique to “while going,” the twitchy hip-hop and the dim light that never came up sufficiently to identify the dancer, lost much of their impact when reprised.
Contemporary
• Music in Time II — After last year’s invasion of jazz artists brought some needed heart and sinew to Spoleto’s contemporary music concerts, series director John Kennedy seems to have decided that he likes the audience enthusiasm (and attendance) generated by accessible music. So this year’s slate remains less cold and bizarre than the pre-Amistad era.
The recital we saw featured composer Michael Harrison performing his own Revelation: Music in Pure Intonation, a solo piece in 12 sections that was lavishly praised by the New York Times and Boston Globe when it was first released on CD in 2007. From a superficial perspective, Harrison’s ramblings resemble the famed musical soliloquies of Keith Jarrett — except that Harrison’s ostinatos could be more insistent and irritating. It’s in the harmonic realm where Harrison breaks new ground. Or you might say he returns to ancient ground, for Harrison overturns the well-tempered tuning that has reigned over Western music for centuries, reverting back to the “just intonation” decreed by Pythagoras in accord with strict mathematical principles.
Harrison makes the dissonances of the ancient tuning — called “commas” and “wolves” — his own special playthings, adjusting his piano’s tuning between sections of his piece with special rakes molded for that purpose, carefully applied to the instrument’s strings. To execute some of his tinkerings, Harrison even delved underneath the soundboard on all fours, pedal still applied.
The differences between conventional and pure intonation were not radical enough to keep my wife Sue — or Kennedy’s wife, for that matter — from napping through most of “Revelations.” But those wolves definitely filled the Simons Center Recital Hall during the tumultuous finale, hovering over the thunderous sound produced by a combination of heavy pounding by Harrison’s left hand and right arm, compounded by heavy pedaling. Perhaps those wolves could be renamed coyotes.
Choral
• Buxtehude & Bach — I always try to get at least one whiff of heaven, courtesy of the mellifluous Westminster Choir, when I’m down at Spoleto, but this was a special treat. Usually, the ensemble does their church concerts a cappella or with a single keyboard. For these five cantatas, two full-lengths by J.S. Bach and three minis by Dietrich Buxtehude, we had a discreetly pruned gathering of the choir accompanied by a distillation of the Spoleto Festival USA Orchestra.
But before the choir strode down the aisle of St. Matthew’s Lutheran to the altar, Courtenay Budd distinguished herself in Bach’s “Mein Herze schwimmt im Blut,” giving us a chance to hear her stretch out more than the Festival’s lunchtime concerts allow — with far more luxuriant backing. Kudos to conductor/chorus master Andrew Megill for the orchestral sound. The silken obbligatos came from the Festival Orchestra concertmaster and oboist Stanley Chyi. Turn to page 108 of the Spoleto program booklet if you wish to imbibe the full international bouquet of this estimable group of young musicians.
The three Buxtehude cantatas allowed individual choristers to shine more than the usual Westminster program, with soprano Martha Culver getting my keenest admiration in her two arias, definitely a talent to watch. Bach’s very early “Christ lag in Todesbanden” — BWV number 4! — supplied the most luscious choral effusions. Even here we had a celebratory cameo from Budd, a duet with Timothy Hodges that found the Westminster tenor holding his own, unintimidated by the soprano’s celebrity.
Jazz
• Tierney Sutton Band — It was the weather’s fault that we had to wait until 10:30 on Saturday night for the Sutton Band’s getaway concert, but despite the audience’s impatience, the sound crew got it right, and the outdoor concert scheduled for 9pm in Cistern Yard sounded like it belonged in Gaillard. We even got a couple of extra songs, “What’ll I Do” and “My Heart Belongs to Daddy,” as Sutton completed her meticulous soundcheck.
I’d be hard-pressed to decide whether I preferred Sutton’s uptempo stylings of “I Get a Kick Out of You” and “The Lady Is a Tramp” or her sultry balladeering on “If I Loved You” and “Skylark.” The lady can scat as well as she can lament. Sometimes Sutton herself seemed torn, having it both ways with “Happy Days Are Here Again” and “Get Happy.” Newbies wanting to get with the program would also find it challenging to decide on where to begin catching up with the Sutton Band’s CDs, since their playlist offered multiple samplings of their four most recent collections, including five cuts from I’m With the Band, their live album.
Sutton left no doubt about how much she loved her band, sharing the spotlight with drummer Ray Brinker on “Surrey With the Fringe on Top,” with bassist Kevin Axt on “People Will Say We’re in Love,” and with pianist Christian Jacob on “If I Loved You.” Individually and collectively, the guys deserved her accolades. Always controlled and perfectly pitched, vibrant without ever raising her voice to a shout, Sutton is one very cool torch singer. Yet even on “Fever,” a piece forever imprinted by Peggy Lee, Sutton never sounded like a she was slavishly imitating the pop smash or desperately straining to sound different — even though she trimmed the accompaniment to drums and bass.
She’s simply her own woman, and that’s that.
• Ramburto Ciammarughi — When the Italian pianist made his American debut at last year’s Spoleto, it was as a sideman in the Stefano Cantini Quartet. If Cantini’s idolatry of John Coltrane often became soprano sax monotony, my JazzTimes review saluted Ciammarughi as a “welcome oasis” who had listened fruitfully to two giants of the keyboard, McCoy Tyner and Chick Corea, and forged a unique synthesis that set him apart.
He must have had a similar effect on Spoleto jazz director Michael Grofsorean, for he fetched the polymorphic artist out of his native Assisi for a full-blown solo American debut of no fewer than six hourlong workouts at the Simons. Ciammarughi’s solo personality on the Steinway was different from what we saw in a combo context, still densely textured but more contemplative, rhapsodic, and modal.
Ciammarughi requested silence between pieces, and it was a sort of homage that he received it. Here the synthesis at times appeared to be of the two faces of Keith Jarrett. For Ciammarughi’s free-ranging ruminations were akin to the virtuosic fantasias of Jarrett’s legendary solo concerts, yet all of these pieces were tethered to tunes written for stage and cinema — the standard rep Jarrett deals with almost exclusively in a trio setting.
A revelatory journey, to be sure. Ciammarughi’s subdued mien clashed with his willful — or was it innocent? — disregard for the basic tenets of jazz hiptitude. A tribute to Charlie Chaplin featuring the Little Tramp’s “Smile” was only the beginning. Tributes to Walt Disney, Nino Rota, Ennio Morricone, Bernstein’s West Side Story, and John Williams followed. Themes from E.T. and Indiana Jones in a jazz concert? Sacrilege!
Yet the inclusion of “Someday My Prince Will Come” was a sly reminder that Bill Evans did Disney, just as “Chim Chim Cher-ee” upbraided any hipster who had forgotten that Trane did too. “Chim Chim,” Grofsorean later reaffirmed, is Ciammarughi’s favorite song.
Ciammarughi’s struggles with English were about the only formidable barrier for an American audience, along with his presumption that we would recognize the filmscore melodies by Morricone and Rota, or the spaghetti Westerns and Fellini works that used them. One interesting fact emerged when Grofsorean subsequently furnished me with the names of the Morricone and Rota tunes — together with the rest of the playlist, which Ciammarughi repeated at all six concerts.
The playlist must have been a blueprint. For while it was informative to find that Rota’s tunes included themes from La Strada, Amarcord, and 8-1/2, the inclusion of the unmistakable “Theme from The Godfather” must have been unplanned. It wasn’t on Ramburto’s list. But it was part of an hour of inspired improvisation.
Chamber Music
• Lunchtime Concerts — This is Charles Wadsworth’s final year as Spoleto’s artistic director for chamber music. More important, Wadsworth’s 50th anniversary season with the Italian and American Spoletos will be his last go-round as genial host of the popular lunchtime concerts. Get him while you can!
Aside from Wadsworth’s inimitable intros, repertoire and musician lineups are potluck. Each of the 11 programs is posted on the traditional chalkboard that has journeyed to Memminger Auditorium while the Dock Street Theatre makeover continues. That happens just before crowds gather in the lobby for the first of the three times each program is repeated.
To a small extent, Wadsworth’s valedictory has signaled a pilgrimage by distinguished alums paying homage to the man and the Festival. Anne-Marie McDermott returned to the keyboard for the first time since 2003, joined by violinist Chee-Yun, who seemed lost to Spoleto forever after the 2007 edition. The two combined most memorably on Beethoven’s heroic Kreutzer Sonata, the best-known work in all of chamber music. It’s hard to grieve over the fading of Chee-Yun’s youth when the heat of her playing seems to rise with each passing year.
The Chee-McDermott electricity also sparked on the D Minor piano trio by Mendelssohn, joined by Alisa Weilerstein, who has become the festival’s go-to cello virtuoso in recent years. Two of the three concerts we attended featured Wadsworth accompanying on piano — he’ll be playing harpsichord, too, before the festival is done — indicating that he wishes to go out swinging. Or at least justifying the extra events in his honor.
Wadsworth also seems to be indulging himself by programming favorite pieces and pet composers. At the “Wadsworth & Friends” musical celebration, Jean-Yves Thibaudet returned to Spoleto USA for the first time since 1989 to join the St. Lawrence String Quartet in the majestic Cesar Franck piano quintet, one of my most treasured memories from Spoleto, where I first heard it back in another century.
On a more intimate scale, Wadsworth programmed a solo piece for cello, “Omaramor,” by Osvaldo Golijov, who was a Spoleto composer-in-residence while his reputation was still on its meteoric rise. This fresh bonbon had Weilerstein bowing and strumming her instrument simultaneously! Four soloists making their Charleston debuts this year may be on the rise right now. Of the three I’ve heard so far, clarinetist Jose Franch-Ballester was the clear standout, nearly upstaging soprano Courtenay Budd on a Schubert lied, “Hirt auf dem Felsen,” and making me want desperately to hear more of Kenji Bunch’s music after his advocacy of “La ultima noche en la Casa de Flamenco.”
What Wadsworth and friends accomplish with their lunchtime vitality and virtuosity may be best expressed by a first-timer I overheard after Chee-Yun and McDermott joined the St. Lawrence in Ernst Chausson’s rarely-encountered Concerto for Violin, Piano and String Quartet. Out in the Memminger lobby, I overheard him saying to a companion: “I’m going to have to investigate this chamber music thing a little further.” (Through June 7)
Bankruptcies
A special shout-out goes to Carolina First Bank for sponsoring Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre and the entire 2009 Spoleto Festival Dance Series. On the other hand, extra-loud Bronx cheers for Bank of America and Wachovia, the mighty Charlotte banking giants who — wait for it — withdrew.
Must have happened rather late in the run-up to this year’s Festival. In the season brochures, BofA Chamber Music and Wachovia Jazz are listed just as they had been in previous years. But they must have yanked their sponsorships before the official 2009 Spoleto program book went to press. Weasels.
This article appears in Jun 2-9, 2009.
