Manny About Town
Giancarlo Menotti and the Spoleto Festival

By Manny Meland

	Giancarlo Menotti

Charleston, South Carolina with its extensive history of involvement with the arts, is the locale for the Spoleto Festival, which this year took place May 25 to June 10.

This year, fans of the festival were saddened by the death of its founder, the famous Italian-born American composer Giancarlo Menotti, who passed away on February 1. He was 95 years old.

Menotti wrote the classic Christmas opera “Amahl and the Night Visitor” for NBC, which was broadcast in 1951 and may have been the first opera written for television. He composed more operas aimed to appeal to the masses. He won a Pulitzer Prize for two of them, The Consul (1950) and The Saint of Bleeker Street (1955). The Consul also earned him the New York Drama Critics award in 1954.

In 1958, he founded the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy. It was created as a forum for young American artists in Europe to bring together fresh creative forces in the United States and European culture. In 1977, he started its companion, the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina, which, during its yearly three week run is visited by close to half a million people. It provides unusual performance opportunities to recognized young artists in all the performing arts, including ballet, modern and post modern dance, opera, chamber, symphonic and choral music, jazz, theatre, and visual arts. The Spoleto Festival helped launch the careers of choreographers Paul Taylor and Twyla Tharp, among many others.

Last season the Miami City Ballet danced at the Carnival Center in Miami. The part of the program I enjoyed most was choreographed by Twyla Tharpe. Incidentally, it was danced to the music of composer Philip Glass.  (For more on Philip Glass read Manny About Town in MiamiARTzine.com Issue 31)

This year’s Spoleto Festival will featured 125 performances, including the first American production of Book of Longing, a 12-part music cycle by Glass based on Leonard Cohen’s poetry collection of the same name. Spoleto also featured the American premieres of two French operas, one by the Baroque composer Christoph Willibald Gluck and the other by contemporary composer Pascal Dusapin, as well as two operas by German composers Kurt Weil and Bertold Brecht. The festival also featured the American debut of Nina Ananiashvili’s  renowned State Ballet of Georgia performing Swan Lake. Somerset Maugham’s The Constant Wife was performed by the Gate Theatre of Dublin. The jazz program lineup featured pianist Ahmed Jamlbe.

For more information on the Spoleto Festival, visit www.spoletousa.org.