The following article appeared in the June 3, 1977 edition of The Wall Street Journal: 

Arts Festival in Gracious Charleston 

By Edwin Wilson
Charleston, S.C. 

Putting an arts festival together is like cooking a bouillabaisse: You have to get the right ingredients, mix them properly, season them and let them simmer. 

For 19 years, Gian Carlo Menotti, opera composer turned impresario, has proved a master chef with his Spoleto Festival in Italy. But now, in starting a sister festival in the U.S., he is trying a different recipe with an important new ingredient—the city of Charleston, S.C., the site of Spoleto U.S.A., which began last week and continues through Sunday. 

As much as anything else, Spoleto U.S.A. is a confluence of two kinds of culture. For Charleston, culture means primarily pride in the past and a way of life. The city is over 300 years old and has more landmark homes and buildings in its downtown area than any other city in America. The homes are lovely: large three-story brick houses dating to the 18th Century with columns and verandas facing sideways (“to take the breeze”) toward formal gardens. Moreover, the people of Charleston are innately hospitable and gracious; they leave their garden gates open as a sign that visitors are free to walk in. 

For Mr. Menotti, culture is defined more in artistic than in social terms. Through the nearly two decades of its existence, his Spoleto Festival in Italy has presented a wide variety of outstanding events—opera, ballet, drama—and has featured some of the world’s best-known artists while introducing an impressive array of new talent. 

Mr. Menotti has long wanted a U.S. counterpart to his Italian program and in many ways Charleston is ideal; not only is it an uncommonly attractive city, it is small enough so that festival visitors can walk to most of the concerts or art galleries as well as the old homes. It also has a surprising number of performing facilities for a city its size. 

Despite a natural attraction for one another, the two cultures—old Charleston’s and Mr. Menotti’s—approached each other warily, and during the two or three years of planning a number of questions about ticket proceeds and the like had to be thrashed out. All along, however, both sides recognized the mutual advantages of their getting together. 

A number of Charlestonians saw this as an excellent opportunity for the city to shake off the artistic lethargy with which it has been charged in recent years. Among them were youthful Mayor Joseph Riley, Theodore Stern, the dynamic head of the College of Charleston (the oldest municipal college in America—a goodly number of institutions in Charleston lay claim to being the oldest in the U.S.), and Frances Edmunds. Mrs. Edmunds, a wise, attractive leader of Charleston society, serves as a liaison between Mr. Menotti and the Charleston establishment. 

Gradually, through the good offices of Mrs. Edmunds and others, the two sides got together and as a result, Spoleto U.S.A. is now gloriously in full swing, with 600 artists and technicians presenting more than 100 events in 12 days. 

A unique feature of the festival is its diversity. In North America festivals are generally devoted to a single art: Marlboro and Tanglewood to music; Oregon, San Diego and Stratford, Ontario, to Shakespeare. But Spoleto U.S.A. has a bit of everything—opera, ballet, chamber music, jazz, drama, sculpture and art exhibits. In addition to large events, there are various mini-festivals: Greek folk dancing, puppet shows in the streets for children and free concerts in many of Charleston’s countless churches. 

Typical of the best of Spoleto U.S.A.—and indicative of its promise for the future—are the noontime chamber music concerts held each day in the Dock Street Theater. Built on the site of the oldest proscenium theater in the country, the Dock Street is an intimate, old-world house, with excellent acoustics. Thanks largely to director Charles Wadsworth, the concerts are an unusual blend of pleasant informality and expert musicianship. 

Using performers from the Lincoln Center Chamber Music Society, which he also heads, Mr. Wadsworth and Peter Serkin, his co-director, have arranged a first-class series involving some of the best young talent in America. Last Thursday, for example, Mr. Serkin and Richard Goode played Mozart’s “Variations in G” for four hands. This was followed by a Bach cantata, with the arias sung in a clear, vibrant voice by Barbara Hendricks, and a Verdi string quartet with James Buswell and Ida Kavafian on violins, Daniel Phillips on viola and Yo Yo Ma on cello. The Verdi was an extraordinary rendition, played with great precision and excitement by four gifted performers. 

Among other important presentations at Spoleto U.S.A. is a new production of Tchaikovsky’s opera “The Queen of Spades,” which marks the American debut of Guido Ajmone-Marsan as conductor and Filippo Sanjust as designer and director. “The Queen of Spades” is a four-hour opera depicting the stormy passions of a man torn between his love for a woman and the lure of gambling. Mr. Sanjust has led a skilled cast through the opera, expertly blending stage business with Tchaikovsky’s rich melodies. As the conductor, Mr. Ajmone-Marsan has shaped a group of young musicians especially auditioned for the festival orchestra into a remarkably effective and cohesive unit. 

Also premiering is a new play by Simon Gray, the British author whose “Otherwise Engaged” is currently running on Broadway. Called “Molly,” it is something of a departure for Mr. Gray, being more serious and highly charged than some of his previous work. It concerns a woman married to an older man and who, largely out of boredom, has an affair with a much younger man. The play is competently directed and acted, especially by Christina Pickles in the title role, and shows real promise. 

Mr. Gray has several themes in the play—one having to do with grown-ups who are actually children, another concerning people who show great pity for animals but very little for human beings and a third relating to a line in the play: “You always lie to people you love and live with, or else you cannot love them or live with them.” If Mr. Gray sharpens these themes successfully he will develop a powerful play. 

As might be expected with a brand-new festival, there have been problems. Somehow the rumor got out that the festival was overbooked and that anyone who drove to Charleston would have to park his car at one of the bridges and get a bus into town. The story is not true and in fact there are still motel rooms and tickets for most events for the remaining few days of the festival. 

There are also minor problems with some of the performing spaces. The Ohio Ballet performs outdoors on a stage at the main building at the College of Charleston; it is an attractive setting, but the sight lines are not what they should be, partly because the stage has been placed so high and partly because light towers obstruct the view for many spectators. And at the Gaillard Auditorium where the operas and other ballets are held, the backstage space is not as large as it should be for full-scale productions. 

No doubt many of these problems will be solved for next year’s festival. As Mr. Wadsworth remarked at one of the noontime concerts, “You stick with us and we’ll get things together.” Those attending the festival this year will be inclined to stick with Mr. Wadsworth, and will only hope that Charleston and Mr. Menotti stick with each other too.