Even with new performances popping up like a rash over the last half of the last week of Spoleto, it’s hard not to notice a pervasive sense of winding down, as when stragglers are still turning up at a party past its announced end time; the caterers are folding up chairs and breaking down tables, but they’re leaving one bar open for those who are still boozing, and the band is still playing for a few partiers who refuse to quit.
The latter half of Spoleto’s second week has seen openings from Sara Baras Ballet Flamenco at the Gaillard, Daniel MacIvor’s A Beautiful View at the Emmett Robinson Theatre, jazz guitarist Marcus Tardelli at Recital Hall, and Danny Hoch’s singular style of hip-hop inflected solo theatre.
Not being musically inclined myself, it was as difficult for me to truly appreciate what Brazilian jazz guitarist Marcus Tardelli did on the stage at Recital Hall Wednesday night as it was to grasp the virtuosity of Jenny Lin’s ownership of the piano on the same stage for the third Music in Time program the previous day. What I do know is that 1) the people around me in the audience for both were gasping over both performances, and 2) Tardelli’s tenuous grasp of English was as perfectly proportional to Lin’s command of it as his humility regarding his talent was matched by her disregard for it.
As Charles Wadsworth might (actually, did) say in a thoroughly different theatre: it was a lot of plucking. City Paper music editor Ballard Lesemann, sitting next to me, seemed to find it dazzling. Tardelli’s guitar was like a living thing, and after each song, when he picked up a nearby hand mic and stuttered a few works of very broken English into it, his charm and sincerity was far clearer than his diction: “ I hope … you think … ah, my music is thousand … no, two thousand …. wait, ah, I have a word … ah, percent … better my English.”
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