CHARLESTON — Three different sea changes have reshaped Spoleto Festival USA since Nigel Redden, responding to the WSYWAT turmoil that followed in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, departed after the 2021 season. Redden saw himself in the crosshairs of the 2020 We See You, White American Theater manifesto, though he wasn’t strictly a theater person, and felt that stepping aside was the honorable thing to do.
As Spoleto 2025 concludes, a near-total change of artistic leadership has transpired, with an unmistakable lean toward diversity. Mena Mark Hanna has replaced Redden as general director. Paul Wiancko has filled the void left by the charismatic Geoff Nuttall’s sudden death, taking over the reins of chamber-music programming. When John Kennedy was abruptly dismissed after the 2023 season, Timothy Myers became music director, wielding the Spoleto Orchestra baton.
And Joe Miller, after 20 seasons as director of choral activities, is resigning to lead the Vocal Arts Ensemble in Cincinnati. His Spoleto farewell, Bach’s Mass in B Minor, will be followed soon by an announcement of his successor in Charleston.
Spoleto is responding to fiscal, box office, and government funding pressures to be more self-sufficient. While Kennedy’s programming arguably made the festival America’s chief hub for 21st-century classical-music composition, his afternoon Music in Time programs were as much box-office poison as they were cutting edge. That experimental wasteland has disappeared as Wiancko and Myers have integrated more infusions of contemporary, new, and world-premiere music into the festival’s chamber music and orchestral offerings.
Beyond shrinking the outré and avant-garde, Spoleto is expanding its pop, punk, folk, and R&B presentations to no less than a dozen Front Row events with Patti Smith, Band of Horses, Mavis Staples, Lucinda Williams, and Jeff Tweedy among the headliners. The strategy is to “expand the aperture,” in Hanna’s words, offset the losses of more adventurous fare, and make Spoleto more accessible to a wider audience. Hopefully, these newbies may be tempted into tasting the 17-day festival’s classical offerings.
Other belt-tightening measures include offering 15% discount packages of tickets to multiple events and ending the longstanding tradition of inviting a theater company from abroad to co-tenant the Dock Street Theatre with the lunchtime chamber-music series. Wilder still, two of the Dock Street chamber-music concerts were staged during evening hours! Sacrilege.
Finally, little touches in the festival brochure and the program booklet underscored a deep-set commitment to making Spoleto more navigable and customer-friendly. Jazz fans could gorge on all the Spoleto headliners within the space of 10 days, while theater lovers could get their fill in seven.
While both of these lineups were tilted toward the latter half of the festival, opera, dance, and orchestral music could be largely traversed within the first 10 days, along with seven of the 11 chamber-music programs. As compacted as the scheduling was for festival-goers devoted to one genre, omnivores like me who preferred a mix found themselves stretched. For us, the scheduling was scattered and fragmented.
How appropriate, then, that the most awesome classical-music event this season, intertwining 27 new works by living composers with J.S. Bach’s Six Cello Suites, was Alisa Weilerstein’s FRAGMENTS. Conceived during the global pandemic, FRAGMENTS has some of the randomness and the quirky, curated individuality of a mix-tape. Weilerstein did not commit herself to playing the Suites in their entirety or — within each Suite — in their traditional order. Or tempo.
Beyond that, in commissioning 27 three-part compositions roughly 10 minutes long, Weilerstein obtained the right to shuffle the order of the parts and to slice and dice the new works to create smooth transitions into each other and the Bach. Layering on stage direction at Sottile Theatre by Elkhanah Pulitzer, scenic and lighting design by Seth Reiser, and costumes by Molly Irelan, Weilerstein crafted her FRAGMENTS into a creation you literally had to see.
As revealed in an interview event moderated by Martha Teichner, Weilerstein has no intentions of releasing an audio recording of FRAGMENTS. Video only. However, the cellist will honor the composers she commissioned by recording their works as written. All in all, Weilerstein was onstage soloing and fielding interview questions for more than seven hours spaced over six days, capped with world premiere performances of FRAGMENTS 5: Lament and 6: Radiance on her final day.
Pieces played at each of the six concerts were not to be found listed in the festival’s program book. There we only found the names of the composers, listed alphabetically by given name, including Bach. You needed to come equipped with a cell phone that was outfitted with a QR code reader to get more specific info on the naming and ordering of the works. Further controlling the freshness of how we heard each piece, Weilerstein did not post any of her listings — or composer bios — until hours before each concert.
After the first day barrage of 1: Wonder and 2: Tumult (intentional puns?), I found myself in stride with Weilerstein, reading the QR codes before each concert and following along. Each FRAGMENT had its own variant on Reiser’s set design — designated by Pulitzer as “installations” in her director’s notes — and his lighting cues, subtly changing within pieces and changing hues at transition points, helped in tracking where we were in each program. Also helpful, the Bach segments were relatively the brightest, least colorful in their lighting.
For listeners accustomed to giving contemporary composers a wide berth, Wonder was likely a poke in the eye, beginning with Joan Tower’s For Alisa, which was nothing like Beethoven’s Für Elise, though Chen Yi’s contributions were often beguiling. Tumult seemed more likable, less resolutely off-putting, spiced with three interminable titles by Caroline Shaw and multiple Sarabandes by Daniel Kidane surrounding one by Bach.
Beginning with Thomas Larcher’s now here and highlighted by Jeffrey Mumford’s from within… unveiling brightness, Weilerstein’s FRAGMENTS 3: Emergence, was the most accessible concert until we reached Lament and the sunniest until we arrived at Radiance. With music by fellow cellist Wiancko, Missy Mazzoli, Courtney Bryan, and Matthias Pintscher, 4: Labyrinth vied with Wonder as the thorniest and most challenging of Weilerstein’s musical collages.
Lament was relatively monochromatic scenically as well as musically, with Reiser shrouding his set pieces in a gray drop cloth. Lifted heavenward by Gerard McBurney’s An Album of Trees, Gabriela Lena Frank’s Dos Soliloquios Breves, and The Last Moho Braccatus by Osvaldo Golijov — with sprinklings of Gabriella Smith’s Infinity Rabbits as a neurotic topping — Lament was the easiest Weilerstein concert to immerse myself in.
Frank and Smith were no less winsome in the concluding Radiance, which also sported new work by Jessie Montgomery, Andy Akiho, and Tania León. It would be difficult to pinpoint how this program was any less thorny than Labyrinth or Wonder. Maybe there was extra exhilaration in the writing or in Weilerstein’s playing. Or perhaps she had taught us how to listen along the way.
The operas at Spoleto this year, Jules Massenet’s Thaïs and Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw, were both must-see events in a more conventional fashion. Staging an opera with the orchestra and conductor as visible as the singers is not a novel idea in Charleston. Unlike the very fine and edgy productions of Don Giovanni or Amistad at Festival Hall, stage director Crystal Manich reprised this approach at Gaillard Center, a far more traditionally styled venue where the audience cannot surround the spectacle.
Aided by Greg Emetaz’s colossal projection designs of Alexandria and its most notorious courtesan, the youthful Spoleto Festival USA Orchestra led by Myers was nicely sandwiched between the players and the scenery. The presence of the orchestra onstage, to be honest, bulked up an opera that is essentially a glorified two-hander, with Nicole Heaston as Thaïs and Troy Cook as Athanaël crisscrossing in their outlooks.
Athanaël succeeds so well in browbeating Thaïs toward piety that he doesn’t notice how irreparably he has been seduced by his convert. So both Heaston and Cook can excel in truly tasty roles without trying to fill the stage on their own. The famed “Meditation” scene, normally so static, comes brilliantly alive with Cook and the Festival Orchestra concertmaster spotlighted in the foreground and a gargantuan projection of the femme fatale behind them.
Leaving aside questions of how Egyptian or slatternly Reneé Fleming could ever be, the Metropolitan Opera production with her in the title role in 2008 seemed far less compelling and far more bloated.
On the other hand, Rodula Gaitanou’s sensational staging of The Turn of the Screw had to rank among the most gripping opera productions seen anywhere — upstaging Thaïs, the theatricalized FRAGMENTS, and all the other theater presented at Spoleto this year. Moving past all the visual and dramatic elements I’ve already gushed over elsewhere, I’ll say that Britten’s score often seemed to disappear into Henry James’s characters and Myfanwy Piper’s libretto — as if these melodramatic people’s voices and words were music.
Britten’s interludes and interstitial music seemed to reverse the process of possessing his characters, as if even they couldn’t contain that music without periodic exorcisms allowing the composer’s passions to overflow. No doubt, the way Britten’s music seemed to haunt and possess the singers built upon the uncanny fit of this story, adapted from the ghostly Henry James novella, at the old-timey Dock Street Theatre.
After all, there may have been real ghosts sitting among us in the house, which dates back to 1736. That would have been the perfect thing for Gaitanou to tell the kids in the cast, Everett Baumgarten as Miles and Maya Mor Mitrani as Flora. Tenor Omar Najmi as the demonic Peter Quint and soprano Elizabeth Sutphen as the impressionable Governess needed no such coaxing. Both were on fire.
Composer-in-residence Mahsa Vahdat, whose ululating style of singing outclassed her writing, was very advantageously programmed at the Dock Street chamber music series, interspersing Antonio Vivaldi’s Four Seasons with four originals in Program 8 and coupled with Bach’s Brandenburg No. 5 in Program 9. The latter Thursday concert, blessed with its world premiere label for her The Dawn/Silent Presence/Journey triptych, not only outdrew her Tuesday Vivaldi but all of the other eight programs I attended.
On might quibble with Spoleto’s eagerness to label their fresh new productions of Thaïs and The Turn of the Screw as “World Premiere” events. Warranted or not, the yellow icon in the festival program book did seem to yield a box-office boost wherever it appeared.
Even the turnout for irresistible countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo was trounced, though he was predictably fabulous. My favorite chamber music concert, Program 6, began with the most delightful piece I heard from a living composer this season, Joan Tower’s Petrouchskates, which really did seem to glide colorfully across a rink. Jay Campbell and pianist Pedja Mužijević combined on Bach’s Sonata for Viola da Gamba in D, sweeter and more relaxed than any of the other Bach cello works on display this year.
And where has Georges Enescu’s Octet been hiding all my life? Certainly not in my cherished softbound bibles of yesteryear, the Gramophone and Penguin guides. My first encounter was pure bliss.
At bigger venues, the best orchestral event was a tossup for me. The youthful energy Myers elicited from the Festival Orchestra in Mozart’s Symphony No. 29 seemed to add an extra glow to St. Matthew’s Lutheran Church in an afternoon concert. But at Gaillard Center four nights later, Alexi Kenney’s bravura in Sibelius’ Violin Concerto triumphed over the orchestra’s lackluster support.
