All the World On a Stage In America

The New York Times

June 4, 2012 — The Spoleto Festival USA justifiably prides itself on variety, but its greatest strength is in its presentations of contemporary work. The festival’s staging of Philip Glass’s opera “Kepler,” which closed on Saturday evening, was dramatically nearly static because Mr. Glass and his librettist, Martina Winkel, wrote it that way, but it explored the relationship between science and religion in compelling, sometimes provocative ways. Full Story

The Voices in His Head

The Wall Street Journal

June 4, 2012 - When Philip Glass’s “Kepler” was performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2009, it seemed like an oratorio, but as staged by Sam Helfrich this year at the Spoleto Festival USA, it reveals its similarity to Mr. Glass’s other “portrait operas,” such as “Einstein on the Beach” and “Satyagraha.” Like those works, it is nonnarrative and nonlinear. Indeed, such action as there is exists largely inside Kepler’s mind. Mr. Glass uses multiple voices to explore the internal contradictions of the 16th- and 17th-century mathematician and astronomer, as well as his political struggles in the unsettled era of the Counter-Reformation. Mr. Helfrich’s ingenious staging makes that structure visible. Full Story

Spoleto Festival: A weekend in the country with Coward

The Charlotte Observer

May 30, 2012 – Maybe all the world’s a stage. But the Bliss family has all the theatrical arena it needs in its own home. Full Story

Spoleto Festival continues to provoke with Glass and Guo Wenjing

Gramophone

May 30, 2012 - The Charleston-based event hosts two premieres of emotional intensity. When the first shots were fired on Fort Sumter in April of 1861, the city of Charleston became known as the ‘cradle of rebellion’, the launching ground for the United States’ Civil War. Such a rebellious spirit lives on in a different way today with the Spoleto Festival USA (its sister festival takes place in Tuscany), a convergence of music, art, dance and theatre that was originally instituted by composer Gian Carlo Menotti. Full Story