The performing arts group in Charleston, S.C., will host 120 events in May and June, its first full season since the start of the pandemic.
After two years of disruptions brought on by the coronavirus, Spoleto Festival USA, the renowned arts group in Charleston, S.C, announced on Friday an ambitious season that it hopes will bring audiences back to live performances.
The season, the first under Spoleto’s new general director, Mena Mark Hanna, will feature more than 120 opera, theater, dance and music performances across 17 days in May and June. The highlights include the world premiere of “Omar,” an opera by the musician Rhiannon Giddens about a Muslim man from West Africa who was enslaved and transported to Charleston in 1807.
Hanna, the first person of color to lead Spoleto in its 45-year history, said the group hoped to offer a platform to overlooked artists.
“We want art to be more than something that expresses received traditions, or something that is a reinforcement of a received canon,” Hanna, the son of Egyptian immigrants, said in an interview. “We want art to have this potential to bridge differences through its transformational power.”
Other highlights include the premiere of “Unholy Wars,” an opera by Karim Sulayman, the Lebanese American tenor, which tells the story of the Crusades from a contemporary Arab American perspective, drawing on music by early Baroque composers. “The Street,” a new work for harp by the composer Nico Muhly will have its American premiere at the festival, featuring text by the librettist Alice Goodman.
The pandemic forced the cancellation of the Spoleto Festival in 2020. Last year, the festival returned with a pared-down season; ticket sales were down 70 percent compared with before the pandemic amid lingering concerns about the virus.
Hanna said he was optimistic audiences would return in force this year as the Omicron variant recedes. The festival plans to require audience members to show proof of vaccination, including booster shots, and to wear masks.
“This is truly about us saying to the world, ‘We have wanted this, we have needed this,’” he said. “That sense of collective catharsis is something that we missed and, even more now than ever, need because of the virus.”
He noted that one of the planned works this season is a new production of Puccini’s “La Bohème,” led by the director Yuval Sharon, that unfolds in reverse, with one if its main characters, Mimì, dying of tuberculosis at the outset of the opera. The reordered opera ends with cheerier scenes of friendship and revelry from the first act.
“The first act is really about renewal and love and youthfulness,” Hanna said. “I see that as a metaphor of moving away from the darkness of the pandemic.”
Source: Music - nytimes.com
