Monthly Archives: June 2025

Spoleto’s 2025 Jazz Lineup Cements the Festival’s Place Among America’s Finest Jazz Showcases

Reviews: Phillip Golub, Cécile McLorin Salvant, Branford Marsalis, Vijay Iyer, Etienne Charles, and Ambrose Akinmusire

By Perry Tannenbaum

June 6, 2025, Charleston, SC – Jazz roots run deep in the Carolinas, where such international jazz ambassadors as Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Nina Simone, and John Coltrane were born. Though we’re usually not mentioned in the same breath as Newport, Monterey, SFJazz, DC, or Montreal, the Carolinas are home to significant festivals worth celebrating in High Point, Columbia, and – in years when we get our act together – Charlotte. Yet our most significant jazz festival has been hiding in plain view for nearly 50 years: Spoleto Festival USA. From its first year in 1977; when the headliners included Phil Woods, Urbie Green, and Louis Bellson; jazz has been a constant at Charleston’s international performing arts revels. Unlike visual arts, country music, puppetry, or circus, jazz has been on the bill at every Spoleto.

Of course, so much more besides jazz is offered at Spoleto. Any of the staple components of the festival – opera, theatre, chamber music, choral music, or dance – can find itself hiding in plain view amid the prodigious entirety of the festival, 120+ performances this year over 17 days. Strip away that mass of other stuff and it isn’t really hard to see that the 2025 lineup down in Charleston measures up with the best in North America. Cécile McLorin Salvant, Branford Marsalis, Vijay Iyer, Ambrose Akinmusire, Phillip Golub, and Etienne Charles not only match up well with the most elite festivals on the continent. Two of them, trumpeter Akinmusire and keyboardist Golub, lingered at multiple festival sites for three-day residencies, giving four and six performances respectively.

Thanks to the efforts of general director Mena Mark Hanna to make the massive festival more navigable, the jazz artists were listed on consecutive pages in the festival’s promotional brochure and the free – and comprehensive – festival program books for the first time. Scheduling was also conveniently compressed so that you could sample all of these jazz giants within the space of 10 days. Mavis Staples and Arooj Aftab, headliners at multiple jazz festivals around the country, were also slotted into Spoleto’s Front Row pop/country/rock/folk series, and accessible during that same timeframe.

My own jazz feast started on Day 5 of the festival with Golub’s quintet, his final program at the Circular Congregational Church. My fondest memory of the Circular dates back to 1997 when Spoleto’s production of Benjamin Britten’s moody Curlew River was staged there in dim gilded light. As a jazz venue, the Church was most unkind to Golub’s piano, which seemed to emerge from its corner as a somewhat muffled echo, though the bandleader’s perch was fortified with a Rhodes synthesizer. Neither Alec Goldfarb’s electric guitar nor Daniel Hass’s cello was spooked by the hall’s acoustics, and the remainder of the rhythm, Sam Minaie’s bass and Adriano Vicentino’s drums, may have actually been enhanced.

The quintet played Golub’s Abiding Memory Suite in its entirety, with Vicentino as the only newcomer to the ensemble that recorded the studio album released in 2024. Once the piece, played without significant pauses, drifted away from the piano, it proved to be nicely varied and unpredictable. After Goldfarb’s guitar pierced the hall with its ethereally thin and silvery timbre in “Threads Gather,” the oddest, most scattered and modernistic episodes, “A Regrouping” and “Unspooled (Waiting Quietly),” cast a quiescent spell. “In a Secret Corner” carried that irregular flow forward, building gradually before breaking back into metrical jazz. Though he played provocatively in spots, Hass seemed underemployed until late in in the suite, when he at last justified his presence with some memorable solo work in “At the 11th Hour.”

It was fascinating to see and hear various configurations of the Spoleto Festival USA Orchestra throughout our 12-night stay. Massenet’s Thaïs, a Mozart symphony, Britten’s The Turn of the Screw, the Sibelius Violin Concerto, and Cécile McLorin Salvant each had a uniquely configured ensemble – led by three different conductors. It was a bit surprising for me, nonetheless, that the ensemble playing behind Alexi Kenney in the Sibelius underperformed compared with the superb support Salvant received three nights earlier in the same hall, Gaillard Center.

There was a sense, after three previous appearances at Spoleto, that both the festival and Salvant were wanting to try something different and reach higher. And until the festival premiered its production of The Turn of the Screw, Salvant was incontestably the highlight. We haven’t seen a new album from Salvant in two years, but none of Darcy James Argue’s orchestral arrangements were from that mostly French Mélusine release. Neither of the songs in the set that the diva has recorded, her own “Left Over” and Noël Coward’s “Mad About the Boy,” had orchestral arrangements before Salvant brought them to Charleston, and she sat down at the piano to replace the esteemed Sullivan Fortner (cover boy on the February 2025 issue of DownBeat) for her own original.

The highlights of the set were Salvant and Argue’s fresh takes on Duke Ellington’s “Sophisticated Lady” and Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life,” perhaps their most beloved ballads. But the audience showed even more enthusiasm for Stephen Sondheim’s “Send in the Clowns” and Michel Legrand’s “I Will Wait for You” from The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. With a disdain that would have pleased Parisians, Salvant sang the original French lyrics, “Je ne pourrai jamais vivre sans toi,” without a single interpolation of the English lyric. Salvant’s “Send in the Clowns” reminded us of the quirkiness that charmed the world from the outset of her career, flouting the usual 3/4 groove, speak-singing some of the familiar lyric, and wiping away some of the usual nostalgia and sentimental goo. Best version I’ve heard since Carmen McRae.

Naturally enough, since Branford Marsalis was on the May cover of DownBeat, he and his quartet surely do have a new album out there to tour with, Belonging. Marsalis didn’t lean on the recent release as heavily as Golub leaned on his, but he certainly referenced his magazine celebrity with the two titles he did pluck from that CD, “’Long as You Know You’re Living Yours” and “Blossom.” Both were Keith Jarrett compositions, chiming well with the front page May headline, “Marsalis Tackles Keith Jarrett.”

Branford was pretty cool as a bandleader, usually slipping away after his soprano or tenor sax solos were done – often abruptly – behind Justin Faulkner and his drumkit when others were soloing. Pianist Joey Calderazzo not only had ample chances to shine in the Jarrett pieces, but he also had two of his compositions, “The Mighty Sword” and “Conversation Among the Ruins,” prominently featured on the setlist.

With past stints jammin’ with Sting and leading The Tonight Show band, it would appear Branford’s appetite for celebrity has long since been satisfied. Bassist Eric Revis also got some love when Marsalis called for his “Nilaste” toward the end of the concert. Lighter gems – and more popular with the Charleston Music Hall crowd – were Jimmy McHugh’s “On the Sunny Side of the Street” and the rousing encore, “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It” (more likely by Buddy Bolden or Clarence Williams than Hank Williams).

Iyer took over Sottile Theatre with his supertrio two nights after Marsalis. Like Iyer, bassist Linda May Han Oh and drummer Tyshawn Sorey (a fellow MacArthur Fellow) had both headlined at Spoleto in past festivals. As a group, they’ve put out two albums in the past four years, but in live performance, it was hard to see them as close-knit. Whether they wished to simulate a recording studio ambiance or someone in the group wished to remain unmasked despite COVID fears is anyone’s guess. But they sat and stood at more than the customary distance away from each other. When I last saw Iyer play at the Jazz Standard in New York, my wife Sue and I were seated closer to Iyer than either Sorey or Oh.

Despite the trio’s separation, their chemistry and interaction were all the more amazing. Each appeared to be in his or her own world, yet they were constantly interconnected. If one of them was not playing, he or she seemed to have peeled off at a predetermined or spontaneously signaled moment. Intensity didn’t wane in those moments when balances shifted among the players. Sorey could assert himself with a single stroke anywhere in a measure and take complete control with a sudden flurry, endlessly inventive and colorful. Oh showed us once and for all that she is a composer/improviser who can easily hold her own in the presence of two major virtuoso composers – even though her bass didn’t penetrate at the Sottile like it does on the trio’s recent Compassion recording, where it’s as intimate as your heartbeat.

As for Iyer, he once again proved nonpareil. In the space of a single piece or solo, he could build to the epic force of McCoy Tyner, jet through that thunderous cloud he and Sorey stirred up, and emerge with all the purposefulness, lyricism, and freedom from mannerism of Bill Evans. “Overjoyed,” a very inventive and angular cover of Stevie Wonder’s tune, was probably the easiest for newcomers to Iyer’s music to latch onto. The “Free Spirits/Drummer’s Song” pairing was far more exciting for me because Sorey was so much sparer, explosive, and creative than he was on the Compassion track. Other trios might have swung harder, but since the great Evans trios, none I’ve heard was more beautiful or compelling.

Since I had seen him live at the Seixal Jazz Festival in Portugal with his quartet less than three years earlier, Akinmusire’s residency was by far the most intriguing for me. But we had to find out what “An Evening with Isaac Mizrahi” was all about – the festival brochure and program book seemed to imply that Mizrahi was everything – so we had to miss out on Akinmusire’s quartet and trio concerts, both of which overlapped. It was especially brutal for me not to attend what would have been my first jazz concerts at Dock Street Theatre after more than 30 years of attending Spoleto, but Sue’s reactions to the giddy Mizrahi and the cutting-edge trumpeter vindicated my choice.

Akinmusire’s gig at the Sottile, our last event in the Holy City this year, was likely the most unique and accessible of his residency, though I’m still bemoaning my lost opportunity to behold an Akinmusire-Fortner-Sorey trio at the Dock. The nine performers in the Honey from a Winter’s Stone concert, including the PUBLIQuartet and vocalist Kokayi, were spread out across the Sottile stage even more widely than the Iyer Trio. Boundaries between what was written by Akinmusire for the string quartet and what was improvised by his quartet were more distinct, but it seemed like Kokayi’s rap rants, rhythmic and melodically on key, straddled those boundaries as the speed of the spewed verbiage increased. Most infectious rap performance I’ve ever experienced, even though most of the words weren’t clear.

Reggie Washington on electric bass and Justin Brown on drums counterbalanced the strings and Kokayi by sticking to their jazz rhythms, but keyboardist Sam Harris brought an acoustic and an electric instrument to the stage, another straddler. Through the course of the evening, as the group traversed their 2025 honey from a winter’s stone recording – with nearly identical personnel – Harris might lay down a vamp on his synthesizer or trigger a modulating drone as frequently as he soloed. Generous space was also set aside for Brown’s thrashings.

Akinmusire had little to say between selections, usually pointing to and naming one of his bandmates, but his horn said plenty, with judicious electronic alterations here and there. You could argue that Akinmusire had somehow synthesized the earliest electronic explorations of Bitches Brew Miles Davis with the two acoustic periods that preceded that revolution, the Kind of Blue period and Davis’s playing with the quintet he led that introduced Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter to the universe. But the living trumpeter is undoubtedly building upon that legacy.

None of this year’s jazz events took place outdoors at Cistern Yard, the temple of Spoleto jazz in years gone by. Like last year, when Trombone Shorty had to move his show to the College of Charleston’s TD Arena, weather intervened between us and seeing Etienne Charles and his Gullah Roots band under the live oaks. By now, such last-minute schedule switches are almost routine at the festival: the sound system is tight and the lurid outdoor lighting arrives somewhat intact. Charles’s show was not quite as rambunctious or gaudy as Shorty’s extravaganza had been, but his suite – soon to be officially released on CD – was far more profound, moving, and relevant.

Nor was there any lack of showmanship in the presentation of this epical suite, which traversed the arrival of the Gullah in the New World via the Middle Passage to the morning when Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation took effect. In three stages, the Gullah Roots ensemble grew from six to seven, seven to eight, and eight to 14 as the massiveness of Charles’s concept enlarged. Those two historical watersheds were both marked with two-part compositions, “Igbo Landing” and “Watch Night.” After the foundational “Gullah Roots” piece, special guest Quentin Baxter, a longtime Charleston-and-Spoleto fixture, joined the group as a second percussionist for the dramatic “Landing.” Later for “Bilali,” Samir LaGus came forth in more striking African garb than we had seen before, bringing with him a guembri, a three-stringed lute-like instrument that merited its own introduction from Charles.

For “Watch Night,” taking us back to New Year’s Eve on December 31, 1862, a four-woman choir (The Wives), vocal soloist Quiana Parker, and organist/choir conductor Damian Sneed joined the solemn vigil and ultimate jubilation. Visually the spectacle was as grand as the music as Sneed and his singers filled the side of the stage opposite LaGus and the percussion. Issued on September 22, the iconic Proclamation would become law at midnight, the beginning of Freedom Day. One day after Juneteenth 2025, Charles brought his Gullah Roots to the Stage Door at Blumenthal Center for what promised to be a very special Jazz Room concert presented by JazzArts Charlotte.

Spoleto’s “Turn of the Screw” Upstages Theatre Launches

Reviews: White Box, Polar Bear & Penguin, and The Turn of the Screw

By Perry Tannenbaum

Programming at Spoleto Festival USA is noticeably more fragmented and bunched-up this season (May 23-June 8), making it a little easier for jazz fans and theatergoers to see the entire sets of offerings without overstaying their budgets. Most of the jazz performances are blocked together on the tenth day through the sixteenth day of the 17-day festival, though Cecile McLorin Salvant and Phillip Golub could be savored on Days 5 and 6. Theatre presentations, however, were not to be seen at all until Day 7, and will continue – though never more than three of the five at once – until the last evening of the festival.

But the best theatre you’ll see here in Charleston this season may turn out to be an opera, Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw, with a script by Myfawnwy Piper adapted from Henry James’s ghostly novella. The world premiere production is directed by Rodula Gaitanou, who triumphed so decisively with her revival of Samuel Barber and Gian Carlo Menotti’s Vanessa two seasons ago.

The Piper script is certainly more family-friendly than the James novella – but not altogether stripped of the novella’s wispy psychological complexities. Scenes are more fragmentary than most old-time operas, more in keeping with the layout of a Renaissance tragedy. Yet Gaitanou doesn’t settle for our imagining the scene shifts from indoors to outdoors or from night to day.

Each scene change in Yannis Thavoris’s extremely supple, elegant, and creepy scenic design is punctuated at Dock Street Theatre – which itself dates back to 1736 – with the drop and rise of a black scrim. These blackouts take us back to the days of silent film, before the simplicity of jump-cuts was imprinted into our DNA. They also place a greater emphasis on the wonders of Britten’s interstitial music, which almost covers every scene change behind the curtain perfectly.

In the one exception, where the scene change must happen without musical cover, soprano Elizabeth Sutphen as James’s famously inexperienced and beleaguered Governess steps in front of the curtain for the space of an aria while the scenery changes behind her. The whole effect of Gaitanou’s staging was magnificent in a way that I hadn’t anticipated. Britten’s music seemed to infuse the pores of every actor, even boy soprano Everett Baumgarten as the possessed Miles, whose vocal lines were as simple and pure as a choir boy’s.

No wonder legendary soprano Christine Brewer as Mrs. Grose, the housekeeper, believes that Miles was incapable of violence. And indeed, the horrific denouement hinges on the boy’s natural delicacy. All is not placid when the child draws our attention. There is major orchestral turbulence when Miles, behind the Governess’s back, tears up the letter she has written to his uncle – and wild skittering sounds when he hurriedly gathers up the pieces of paper from the floor.

Not only does Thavoris’s scenery harmonize with his costume designs and synchronize with Britten’s music, it is wondrously detonated by Paul Hackenmueller’s lighting. At key moments throughout the two-act opera, the huge mirror that nearly dominates the set turns translucent or transparent, revealing the ghosts that haunt the estate. These ghosts might simply stand there in Hackenmueller’s eerie blue light or they might come to melodramatic musical life and sing.

Omar Najmi sings the narrative prologue before tackling the charismatic tenor role of Peter Quint, the more malignant of the two ghosts. His wholesome and romantic appearance, like Miles’, belie the evil lurking within – but Quint’s evil is never under musical restraint. There never needs to be any question that Quint is a madman, and Najmi never leaves any doubt.

The struggle between Quint and Miles is more titanic than that between the other ghost, Miss Jessel, and Miles’ sister, Flora. Yet an extra eeriness had wafted into this Spoleto world premiere on opening night because the singer portraying Jessel, Mary Dunleavy, was still recovering from an illness. She still acted the role, lip-synching to Rachel Blaustein, who sang the role from offstage. Blaustein sometimes sounded sepulchral and indistinct from wherever she was sequestered, in and outside Dunleavy’s body, depending on where she stood.

Fortunately for Blaustein and all the other treble voices at Dock Street, but especially for us, there are English subtitles on hand when the text might otherwise be lost. Sometimes, as when Baumgarten sings “Malo, malo,” it’s just good to have the projected text above the proscenium to confirm what we’re hearing!

Aside from the oddity of these subtitles for a Broadway show, it’s hard to see why this gripping production couldn’t be a hit. Dunleavy’s interactions with Israeli soprano Maya Mor Mitrani, singing the role of Flora, are particularly outré and suggestive. Though the text never seems to give her enough to justify her take, Mitrani’s brattiness only clashes with the elegance of her lavish Victorian dress, and there’s a frequent sense of jealousy toward Miles because of the attention he draws under Quint’s spell.

In the climactic lake scene, where the ghost of Jessel supplicates Flora, Gaitanou tosses aside any notion from fussy modern lit critics that there is ambiguity on whether James’s ghosts are real or figments of the Governess’s fevered imagination. We see Jessel, floating above Flora in her boat on the lake, long before the Governess does. Until then, she’s quietly ashore on a quaint little bench, absorbed in a book.

Numerous creepy touches abound, not the least of them involving the onstage curtains that hide or highlight the ghosts lurking behind the huge mirror. Suddenly the curtain begins rustling behind the children and adults onstage – yet nobody there notices for the duration of the scene. But we do.

White people obsessed by the white polar regions has been a powerful theme since Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein (1818) and Edgar Allen Poe wrote The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym (1838). It was still in the air when Swedish adventurer Salomon August Andrée proposed a new method of mapping out the North Pole to the Royal Geographic Society in 1895: exploring the region in a hydrogen balloon.

Once again, wind conditions weren’t ideal. But Andrée, more adventurous than patient, lifted off with his comrades anyway and… vanished. For 33 years, nobody knew their fate for certain until their remains were recovered and brought back ceremoniously to Stockholm in 1930. The fullest narrative took another 66 years to recover, pieced together with the journals of the three explorers and the partial restoration of Strindberg’s photographs.

Sabine Theunissen rewinds the story in White Box in its US Premiere at Emmett Robinson Theatre on the College of Charleston campus. From a theatrical standpoint, it’s a very quirky and visual retelling, making liberal use of Nils’s photographs and primitively enhanced animations. He seems to be more of Theunissen’s protagonist than Andrée, but none of the three men onstage has any dialogue.

Thulani Clarke and Fana Tshabalala are designated as Dancers in the Spoleto program book, while Andrea Fabi is labelled Performer, presumably because he shapeshifts between Nils and Andrée. Given the silence of the humans, the old-timey camera, mounted on a wooden tripod and occasionally capable of a life of its own (thanks to puppeteer Meghan Williams), could be regarded as a fourth character.

So far what we’re describing might be viewed as akin to silent film, even though Catherine Graindorge adds violin and viola from one side of the hall and Angelo Moustapha adds piano and percussion from the other. Not even granted a bio in the program – or present for the final bows – Maria Weisby delivers all the info we can hear via pre-recorded Voice Over.

It’s hard to detect any consistent intent or message in Theunissen’s various caprices. Her Dancers are part of the expedition party and they aren’t. Their choreography from Gregory Maqona is more African than Nordic and so are their skins. The same disconnect doesn’t always apply to Graindorge’s music composition, but aside from the honky-tonk piano by Moustapha bookending the narrative, his percussion has more of a jungle flavor than an evocation of windswept Arctic tundra and ice caps.

And Theunissen’s declaration that she must tell her tale backwards to tell it right isn’t religiously carried out – though we did learn why the expedition was doomed from the start toward the end of the show. Somehow, all of Theunissen’s quirks and incongruities worked beautifully, even poetically. And viscerally.

When Nils stands doomed on a sea of ice, dancing with his mammoth camera, we can join him in tossing accuracy and logic to the winds.

Even more fanciful was the children’s show that opened on the same Saturday that White Box closed, Polar Bear and Penguin, written and acted by John Curivan and Paul Curley. Brrrrr! So theatrically speaking, it was a bipolar weekend in balmy Charleston.

Curivan and Curley (who better to concoct this alliterative title?) had some bipolar intentions of their own. For polar bears are only found natively in the northern hemisphere while penguins are natively confined to the south. Wherever they bump into each other on runaway icecaps, their personalities are also poles apart, replicating the ancient grasshopper and the ant fable. In floating igloos.

As Polar Bear, Curivan is all carpe diem: see a fish, catch a fish, eat a fish. Curley is more communal, considerate, and calculating as Penguin. In the here-and-now, Penguin will catch a fish and share a fish. Longterm, he will catch another fish and save it for later. Curivan uses his paws to bash a hole in the ice and grab his prey. The more sophisticated Curley – yes, Clara Fleming’s costume design includes full-length tux jacket and tails – extracts a fishing pole from Penguin’s little cave.

Ah, but they don’t merely catch fish out there in the frozen North or South. Penguin hooks a bottle, Polar Bear hooks a shoe, and something with buttons pops out of the deep, maybe a cell. Curivan and Curley subtly remind us with these human throwaways – and the occasional sound of airplanes above – that these primal and adorable creatures are cast adrift and endangered by the overreach of civilization.

Global warming.

Meanwhile, Polar Bear and Penguin demonstrate that their differences can be bridged as they become best friends. Until a crisis emerges at a cookout that irresistibly engaged the participation of the ankle-biters in the audience. Penguin was cooking up a glorious fish dinner from a hidden spot upstage while Polar Bear was downstage waiting for dinner, sorely tempted by an overflowing pail of raw fish that they had caught and agreed to save for later.

Each time Penguin exited to tend his unseen campfire, a new wave of temptation assailed Polar Bear. As if Peter Pan and Tinkerbell were hovering somewhere in the darkened hall, children all over the Rose Maree Myers Theatre in North Charleston began hollering to Polar Bear not to eat the damn fish.

In some ways, our innocence remains intact.

But Curivan and Curley didn’t leave us with a happily-ever-after ending. Before the lights went down, Polar Bear and Penguin reconciled, closer friends than ever before. Bear achieves better impulse control while Penguin tempers his hoarding tendencies. All that chumminess, sad to say, didn’t prevent a further thaw of the ice that connected their little caves. So they finally drifted towards opposite wings of the stage, separated forever.

A little girl sitting in front of us burst into tears, inconsolable as her mom carried her away. She likely got the point more keenly than her peers – and likely better than many of her elders here in Trump Country.

The bulk of Spoleto’s theatre lineup has yet to open, The 4th Witch opening on June 4, Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski making its bow on June 5, and Mrs. Krishnan’s Party arriving on June 6. Until then The Turn of the Screw reigns as my top pick, with a final performance on June 6.

Must-See Classical Abounds at Spoleto Festival USA

Reviews: Opera, Chamber Music, Orchestral Music, and Alisa at Spoleto

By Perry Tannenbaum

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 brutal murder, departed after the 2021 season. Redden saw himself in the crosshairs of the 2020 We See You White American Theatre manifesto, though he wasn’t strictly a theatre person, and felt that steeping as aside was the honorable thing to do.

Diversity has never been inimical to Spoleto, which has always looked more Euro and Afro than American. Yet 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.

Conversely, 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 ghetto has disappeared while 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 higher protein offerings.

Other belt-tightening measures include offering 15%-off discount packages of tickets to multiple events, and ending of the longstanding tradition of inviting a theatre 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 deepset 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 theatre 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 eleven chamber music programs. As compacted as the scheduling was for festivalgoers 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 mixtape. 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.