Category Archives: The Social Scene
Spoleto Festival Orchestra: let’s talk about sax
On Saturday, sandwiched between my postcast conversation with P&C critic Joshua Rosenblum and a noontime encounter with Charleston Ballet Theatre’s final Brown Bag & Ballet performance, I ran into one of the Spoleto Festival Orchestra’s 113 amazing young musicians. Eliot Gattegno is a first-year saxophonist with the SFO who was hanging out at Kudu Coffee [...]
Reporting from the other side
Is it over?
For the first time in three weeks, a day in my Google Calendar is completely, utterly empty. There’s nothing there but the date – June 11 – and a blank expanse of white space. My brain is fried, my innards are pickled, my back is killing me, and my culture tank is fully [...]
Throwing stones in Glass houses
Ninety-six degrees out there and rising. If we didn’t have calendars, that number alone would tell us the festival is drawing to a close and throwing open the door to the dog days of summer. There’s just about 28 hours left in Spoleto Festival 2007 – which means it’s not over yet for this Spoleto [...]
That was a lotta Latin
It looks like there may be another booming storm cooking up out there, preparing to punctuate the tail end of a fine day. As with last week, Monday and Tuesday have been low on rollouts for the Big Festival, as it recuperates from a second crazy weekend and gathers itself for the last mad rush [...]
Is it opera? Or music theatre? Or both?
Blog reader Wendy Gleim, who’s hosting the private post-performance party for composer Philip Glass and his Book of Longing posse at her Ashley Avenue home on Friday, sends along an excellent feature from the Toronto Globe and Mail about Glass from last week, written just prior to that city’s world premiere of Glass’ new work [...]
Spoleto central: Kudu Coffee
If, as Geoff and Dan at SpoletoToday have observed before, the Spoleto press room this year is not quite as buzzing with activity as in previous years, the unofficial top artist hangout spot this festival is more than making up for it. That would be African-themed Kudu Coffee on Vanderhorst Street, half a block from [...]
Hotter than Dutch love
The twenty-something hipster quotient at Friday’s Spoleto Soiree was off the charts and into another realm altogether. You could have powered a small city for a week on the sexual energy crackling around the Gaillard Exhibition Hall, fueled by several open bars, pulse-punding ung-cha-ung-cha from a DJ in the corner, enough liquor to fill the [...]
Our foreign correspondance
The New York Times’ James R. Oestreich continues to be the sole representative of the major U.S. news media in town for the festival. Ironically, the Toronto Globe and Mail seems to be the only other out-of-towner with a reporter, Paula Citron, on the streets of Charleston for some critical reportage – possibly because that [...]
Sign of the Times
New York Times reporter James Oestreich files two more reports for his ArtsBeat blog on the festival this afternoon. One’s a bemused rumination on the festival’s frenetic social calendar, which should satisfy Party Blogger Jonathan Sanchez (apparently Oestreich was at last night’s post-Wei/Bang party). In the second, he muses on the ubiquity of Philip Glass’ [...]
Getting forensic on Spoleto 2007
The 31st Spoleto Festival USA is officially in the past tense. It’s now time to get forensic on the thing. But that’s less easy than it sounds. Part of the difficulty in summing up the festival after the fact lies in its nature; as Mayor Riley noted during the mid-festival tribute to founder Gian Carlo [...]