spoleto music festival and festival dei due mondi and israel philharmonic orchestra and tiffin boys choir and spectrum dance theater

Perched halfway up a hill in the Central Appenines, dominated by an imposing Castle ("the Rocca"), the Umbrian city of Spoleto is at once a throwback to medieval times and, during the Festival dei Due Mondi, a host to some of the more avant-garde musical and dance companies in the West. The cab driver told us that the city has about 23,000 residents but when you include the "suburbs" (my word), there are about 33,000 people in the area. The town is immortalized by several realities: (1) it was the seat of the Lombard Dukes of Spoleto in the so-called "dark ages"; (2) it was the place where St. Francis of Assisi was supposed to have received a vision (while he was on a crusade) that he "should have been serving the Master (God) rather than the servant" (the leader of the crusade, Walter of Brienne); (3) it has a 800' long bridge, designed by Gattapone in the 14th century to look like a Roman aqueduct, which connects the castle to the wilds of the Monteluco woods behind it. Goethe crossed this bridge during his trip to Spoleto in the late 1780s, declaring that the awesome vistas he encountered reminded him of the importance also of our inner spirit and life. And, since the Italian musician Gian Carlo Menotti decided to gather some of his friends for summertime musical entertainmenet about 50 years ago, Spoleto has been the place of an annual music festival (Festival dei Due Mondi).*

[*While we were exploring the Umbrian countryside on July 1, we happened to run into a winery--I write about it elsewhere--which had brochures about a Trasimeno Music Festival. Begun in 2005 by the vision of Angela Hewitt, the Trasimeno festival, on the banks of this lake known for being the place where Hannibal crushed the Romans in 217 B.C. during his apparently relentless assault on Rome, is held during the first week of July, and thus dovetails perfectly with the Spoleto Festival. Lake Trasimeno is about 30 or 35 miles from Spoleto].

The Importance of Music Festivals

One should not ignore the signal importance of an event like a music festival for the economic health of a town. For the opening concert, for example, more than 1,000 well-dressed people from far and wide showed up not only to hear the incomparable sound of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra but to patronize the many fine restaurants and hotels of Spoleto. Rather than becoming a lazy place which would attract the occasional tourist under the hot Umbrian summer sun, Spoleto becomes transformed into a world-class venue to enjoy and meet artists from all over the world.

Before mentioning a few of the performances, I would like to dwell on this last point. On the evening before the inaugural concert, when a band was playing in the Cathedral Square coffeeshop and my friend and I were talking about the upcoming concerts, we were apparently overheard by someone who quickly introduced himself as a double bass player in the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. For the next 20 minutes or so, we not only learned about the music he would play, but of stories of the "boy genius" who is their conductor (Gustavo Dudamel), the life of a concert musician and a variety of other musical and non-musical subjects. Again, one afternoon I was walking in the square and I ran across Colin Poole, who along with Jane Mason had just performed the night before in a moving mime/dance routine entitled "Bad Faith," which I witnessed. I struck up a conversation with him about his work. Later that day we ran into him and Jane at the Spoleto train station as we were both boarding for Rome, and we exchanged not only pleasantries but learned about his work in England. Thus, the Festival brings international life to a charming town that could otherwise have become something of a backwater when compared to Rome, Florence or even Assisi.

On to The Festival

Our experience of the Festival began on the day before the Inaugural Concert, when Colin Poole performed his "Bad Faith," which skillfully explores themes of race, sexuality and distrust through mime and dance. Then, on July 1, we attended the Inaugural Concert, which is held in the large piazza in front of the Duomo. The venue was so Italian but so transcending the realities of the moment, too. In order to heighten the symbolism of entering the Duomo Piazza, all of us came in by the gracious Duomo steps, a series of about 50 gently falling steps that took one into the heart of the Piazza. But, before the Festival officials let us in (and the "gates" didn't open until about 40 minutes after the tickets said the concert was to begin), 1000 spiffily-attired adults gathered on the narrow streets of the upper town to wait. And, true to the Italian spirit, the narrow roads were not shut off to traffic. Thus, one had the relatively ludicrous situation of mounted Italian policemean in the squares, posing for pictures with infants on their laps, being completely useless to stop the flow of traffic down the narrow alleys where 1000 or more people were crammed waiting for the gates to open. On more than one occasion, I heard heated exchanges in which a nattily dressed patron would threaten to throw one of the drivers into the middle of the Piazza if he came an inch closer to him with the car. Thankfully, the evening opened without incident, and we heard several inspiring pieces by the Philharmonic--none more so than Lizst's First Piano Concerto, performed by Yundi Li, and the incomparable Fifth Symphony of Dmitri Shostakovich.

But it was the symbolism of the evening concert that actually affected me more powerfully than the music itself. Here we were, encradled before the facade of a 700 year-old Duomo, the symbol of the Christian world, with a facade lit up by spotlights, with swallows eerily quiet during the Lizst piece but flying and diving during Shostakovich. But what we were hearing was music played by one of the most skilled orchestras of primarily Jewish musicians in the world, playing music of one who stood against the tyrannies of Stalin, though not always expressing those disagreements in ways that would protect him from that megalomaniac. The Duomo endures; the music appears to be fleeting, but really it was the music that brought life to that square on a pleasantly breezy summer night.

Before we left Spoleto for good on July 3, we also heard performances by the Tiffin Boys Choir and saw a dance rendition of Sleeping Beauty and other stories (such as Swan Lake) by the Seattle-based Spectrum Dance Theater. And, there was so much more to see and hear. The band Cafe Chantant played throughout the city, with a selection of songs ranging from jazz to classical, always ending with the stirring Radefsky March by Strauss; the Roman theater came to life with the performance of Spectrum; the medieval Church of St. Euphemius provided the perfect acoustics for the boys from Tiffin.

Conclusion

All in all, Spoleto gave me one of the nicest artistic as well as gastronomic and hotel experiences I have had in quite some time. I still hear the sounds, and see the artists, playing with all their hearts.

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