If the opening weekend of the 2026 Spoleto Festival USA asserted one notion (and, trust me, it put forth far more than that), it is that the human race remains the driving architect of its own artistic expression.
From high-stakes Baroque opera to high-flying bluegrass, from iconic works fron of a trailblazing American choreographer to spine-tingling spirituals in a sacred space, the festival put forth a mighty, meaningful case for human agency, particularly in its artistic expression.
Human to human
Program I of Bank of America Chamber Music I has long enthralled with its approach: an accessible, gloriously human foray performed in an intimate setting for artists to become one with their instruments, and with their audience, too.
As Charles E. and Andrea L. Volpe Director of Chamber Music., Paul Wiancko wears his humanity, too. He fan-gushed over mezzo-soprano Jennifer Johnson Cano, who launched the hour with a sunset-sunrise duo: Richard Strauss’s reflective, hope-tinged Morgen!, then the 1914 Il Tramonto by Ottorino Respighi to devastating effect.
Contemporary composer Paola Prestini’s Mother Moon Songs mined motherhood, and Dvorak cracked an American soundscape with Dvorak’s transfixing String Quartet 12, American, written when the composer was living in Spillville, Iowa. “You can tell he’s been listening,” Wiancko mused, likening it to a mash up of Spaghetti Western and Czech folk.
Try to replicate that, ChatGPT.
Body of opera
Both operas on offer this year brought this point home with their shared reliance on the human vessel as instrument, prop and even stage set. In The Old Maid and the Thief, festival founder Gian Carlo Menotti’s ingenious 1939 radio play-turned-staged work, the production pointed up gone-by days by dressing a set to inhabit its historic venue, and topping off with a vintage, wood-burnished radio centerstage.
No sleek techno-projections here. For sonic and visual effect, performers instead used every bit of their artist instrument, grabbing a wooden banister to form a staircase or toting a potted plant for a street scene. But the main event was their lung power, which converged with one another and the orchestra to keep this ebuilient work bubbling along.
Dido and Aeneas, the Baroque opera composed by Henry Purcell, likewise leveraged superior vocal artistry from its ensemble, also home in on the human form and its potential, with 10 performers from Australian circus company Circa aho manifest the crescendoing peril at play for the Queen of Carthage and her beloved Trojan hero, keeping all transfixed in its precarious present by way of their triumphs of the human condition, while underscoring they are forever on a razor’s edge with calamity.
I would be hard pressed to find a commensurate experience in the digital sphere.
Then there was the abiding human energy, harnessed as only Martha Graham Dance Company can. As tribute to the company’s centennial, Graham 100 presented seminal works that lent insight to the choreographer’s distinct, enduring physical language, one that tapped into the human psyche in visceral, powerful fashion. As the time frame of the works advanced from the spectre of proliferating Nazism to our own national moment of foment and protest.
Soprano meets banjo
At Charleston Gaillard Center, formidable artistic forces joined: legendary soprano Renee Fleming and banjo behemoth Bela Fleck, along with an impressive gathering of bluegrass musicians and vocalist Aiofe O’Donovan, to mine love and war and loss.
Drawing from Appalachian traditions, The Fiddle and the Drum was an ecstatic journey down a coursing, sparkling mountain stream, one taking pause for Fleming’s extraordinary voice in soul-stirring folk standards like “He’s Gone Away” and “In the Pines.”
Fleck then took off with flights of American-made fancy via a show-stopping, tour-de-force Rhapsody in Blue (grass) that left nothing on the august Martha and John M. Rivers Performance Hall stage. The sound was staggering, but the marvel was as much in the music-making, which converged American forms, bridged city and country and delivered a shared exploration of our national experience.
Sacred sound and space
On Memorial Day, the festival presented a free concert, Davóne Tines and The Truth: Revival, featuring the magnificent bass-baritone with his band The Truth (John Bitoy, piano; Khari Lucas, bass and sound artist), and flutist and sound healing practitioner DeShaun Gordon-King.
Produced in collaboration with Foundation for Spirituality and the Arts and held at Emanuel AME Church, the aim, Tines said, was for all to arrive at a shared humanity, drawing from spirituals, folding in poetry and meditations, as “participants in a sacred moment.”
With a hum from the sound board, constantly recalibrated by Mark Crawford of Fox Audio Visual, musicians sonically rode and wove through its intensifying reverberations, creating vibrational experience that opened one up to the keening trills of the flute, the reflective chords of keys and strings.
Tines offered Richard Smallwood’s hymn “Total Praise” as a possibility rather than performance. “We are all a part of our collective humanity.” In stunning range and power, he inhabited “I’ll Fly Away” as both spiritual and prayer, and Julius Eastman’s “Prelude to The Holy Presence of Joan of Arc” as a rousing, resonant clarion call. By “This Little Light of Mine,” featuring Tony Burke, all nerves and sensors throughout the rapt room were wholly spoken for.
In all, it was a resounding vote for humankind, as challenged and churlish as that may presently seem. Through blood, sweat and tears, and, yes, with an occasional, worthwhile assist from the wired, the festival confirms that as of thise weekend, we remain the masters of our own sentient and sapient journey.
Help keep the City Paper free.
No paywalls.
No subscription cost.
Free delivery at 800 locations.
Help support independent journalism by donating today.
