Word: spoleto
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...city I'm glad to be married to." The indefatigable Composer-Director-Impresario Gian Carlo Menotti was at it again, in what could be the greatest -and riskiest-romance of his long career in music and the performing arts: launching an American version of Italy's Spoleto Festival in Charleston, S.C. Menotti created the original festival in June 1958, transforming the quiet old Umbrian hill town of Spoleto into an international center of the arts...
Somewhat hesitantly, it did. Italy's Spoleto title, Festival of Two Worlds, suggests that Menotti had transatlantic ambitions when he moved into Spoleto 20 years ago. The site search for the U.S. half of the enterprise did not begin until 1973, however; New Orleans and San Antonio were among the places considered. Says Conductor Christopher Keene, Spoleto's music director and the first member of the staff to advocate Charleston: "It had a combination of positive and negative values-a highly developed aesthetic and architectural sense combined with a relatively undernourished cultural life...
Charleston also had good performing and tourist facilities. Almost as important, Spoleto U.S.A. received local pledges of $200,000 toward the $850,000 cost of the first season. Many proper Charlestonians. however, had doubts at the beginning, and a few still do. They are fond of their city as it is and well aware that an annual cultural bazaar like Spoleto can overwhelm a small city -the jazz festival engulfed Newport, R.I., for years. Nor were Charlestonians reassured by reports that some money raised in the U.S. was to be set aside for the Italian festival. That was initially...
...streets were hardly crammed with festival goers. Less than 2,000 paying customers showed up at the 2,700-seat Gaillard Municipal Auditorium for the first big evening event-the four-hour uncut production of Tchaikovsky's opera The Queen of Spades, first introduced last year at Spoleto, Italy. But if the variety and excellence of the first week's offerings were fair guides, Spoleto U.S.A. should become a success...
...just any old chorus gets invited to even participate in the Music Festival in Spoleto, Italy. But only the finest of the groups in the world get invited to function as the Festival Chorus. The latter distinction was bestowed recently upon Harvard's Collegium Musicum, a collection of 70 amateur vocalists who combine to form a chorus of undeniably professional caliber. The mixed chorus of 70 who, as one member put it, "like to sing more than just about anything else," will present their first concert of the season this Friday night in St. Paul's Church...