The Spoleto Festival USA has opened its new season with a lineup that includes three operas, a production by Ireland’s Gate Theatre and a concert by banjoists Bela Fleck and his wife, Abigail Washburn.
The 38th edition of the festival concludes on June 8 with a concert and fireworks at an antebellum plantation on the Ashley River.
By that time, there will have been 148 performances by 63 artists and ensembles.
Several hundred people gathered in the heat in front of City Hall to hear speeches and a brass fanfare like those that have opened every festival since the late composer Gian Carlo Menotti established Spoleto in Charleston in 1977 as a companion to his Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy.
Ong Keng Sen, the director of the Singapore International Festival of the Arts who is directing one of the Spoleto operas, Facing Goya, is back for the third time.
He called Charleston “this beautiful city of enlightenment” and told the crowd “it is one of my greatest pleasures that I am in this city.”
He added the power of the festival is not only that it presents classical works, but provides a place where new operas can be produced and performed.
“This is one of the few festivals in the world and one of the only festivals in America which is still producing new opera at this intensity, with this intimacy and with this kind of love,” he said. “For that I am very grateful.”
Charleston Mayor Joseph Riley Jr, who helped convince Menotti to establish the festival in the US, said the city has been changed for all time as a result of the Spoleto artists’ commitment to excellence.
“That experience challenges this city and all that we do — to reject the easy, the medium the just OK,” he said, adding the city now seeks to excel “in what we build, in how we act and how we care for each other.”
The opening ceremonies were capped by a performance by Jason Hortin of Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, one of this year’s dance ensembles.
In addition to Facing Goya, this year’s Spoleto is producing John Adams’ opera, El Nino, which tells the nativity story drawing on the Bible, European writings and sermons and Latin American poetry.
The third opera is Kat’a Kabanova with Tony Award-winner Garry Hynes directing her first opera.
The Gate Theatre Stage is returning to the festival performing the whodunit My Cousin Rachel.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
DITCH TACTICS: Kenyan officers were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch suspected to have been deliberately dug by Haitian gang members A Kenyan policeman deployed in Haiti has gone missing after violent gangs attacked a group of officers on a rescue mission, a UN-backed multinational security mission said in a statement yesterday. The Kenyan officers on Tuesday were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch “suspected to have been deliberately dug by gangs,” the statement said, adding that “specialized teams have been deployed” to search for the missing officer. Local media outlets in Haiti reported that the officer had been killed and videos of a lifeless man clothed in Kenyan uniform were shared on social media. Gang violence has left
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
Japan unveiled a plan on Thursday to evacuate around 120,000 residents and tourists from its southern islets near Taiwan within six days in the event of an “emergency”. The plan was put together as “the security situation surrounding our nation grows severe” and with an “emergency” in mind, the government’s crisis management office said. Exactly what that emergency might be was left unspecified in the plan but it envisages the evacuation of around 120,000 people in five Japanese islets close to Taiwan. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has stepped up military pressure in recent years, including
RSS