Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), a founding father of modern science, is credited with discovering the laws of planetary motion. In “Kepler,” minimalist composer Philip Glass credits him with a more human achievement: trying to reconcile scientific discovery with the divine.
“I’m interested in the scientist as a dreamer, the scientist as a poet,” Glass said in a recent interview.
In commemoration of the composer’s 75th birthday, the 2012 Spoleto Festival USA will showcase the first fully staged production of Glass’ opera in the United States, one of the more hypnotic highlights of the 36th annual festival here.
Running may 25-June 10, the festival has scheduled more than 140 performances in 13 venues, featuring 60 artistic ensembles and individual performers from the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Spain, China, Brazil, Japan, Canada and the United States.
To date, “Kepler” has been presented only in concert form, partly for budgetary reasons. The full opera premiere will be directed by Sam Helfrich with Resident Conductor John Kennedy leading the 83-member Spoleto Festival USA Orchestra. Glass also will be on hand June 2 for a featured Music in Time piano-side conversation with Kennedy.
“One of the things I feel Philip has done in many of his operas is having taken iconic figures — whether Gandhi, Einstein or Martin Luther King — and made them human,” says Nigel Redden, festival general director. “We know Kepler as a name, and he is very much in the news via NASA’s the Kepler space explorer, which recently has discovered two Earth-like planets.
“We know the man as an astronomer or as someone revered in the world of science. we don’t really know him as a person. ‘Kepler’ deals with him as a man, as well as someone who is thinking about the music of the spheres. on some level, perhaps, Philip’s music captures the grandeur of what I imagine to be the sound of the universe.”
East meets West
Sharing the operatic spotlight with “Kepler” is the American premiere of “Feng Yi Ting,” a contemporary Chinese opera by composer Guo Wenjing. The title is loosely translated as “the pavilion where the phoenix lived or might live.” at the helm is respected Canadian film director Atom Egoyan (“The Sweet Hereafter”).
“Feng Yi Ting” chronicles a fateful meeting destined to change the course of Chinese history. Beijing opera tenor Qian Qihu and Sichuan opera soprano Shen Tienmei are bolstered by an artistic team sporting Tony Award-winning set designer Derek McLane, costume designer Han Feng and conductor Ken Lam, who leads an orchestra of 11 Western and four traditional Chinese instruments.
The production amplifies the attention Spoleto increasingly has paid to the work of contemporary artists and those crossing conventional genre boundaries.
“I think this is going to be fascinating,”
Redden says. “Genre bending is perhaps not the right way of describing ‘Feng Yi Ting,’ but certainly it is culture bending in the sense that there are Chinese and European instruments and the musical idiom is both Western and Chinese. The story will be told in a way that is still evolving.”
Egoyan also will be attending the festival. Those who have followed his career as a filmmaker may not know he has been engaged in opera for some time.
“It’s moonlighting from his day job of films, but he seems to take great pleasure in doing opera,” adds Redden. “And he has this wonderful enthusiasm for this particular score. one of the things Atom seems to be able to do is to find those things that are implied in a piece as well as those things that are said — a true line of intent that is not explicit.”
Wit and physicality
Festival favorite The Gate Theatre, Dublin, returns to Spoleto with Noel Coward’s comedy of manners, “Hay Fever. Also on the theatrical bill of fare is London-based multimedia troupe 1927′s “The Animals and Children Took to the Streets” (a darkly comic fairy tale told through live performance, music and stylized animation) and one-man shows by Jack Hitt and Mike Daisey.
Hitt, a Peabody Award-winning journalist and author who hails from Charleston, melds an amiable anecdotal style with an interest in contemporary brain science in “Making Up the Truth,” while Daisey unsheathes his sharp wit to slice and dice a variety of topical subjects.
In addition to 1927, standard-bearers for the physicality that is said to suffuse the 2012 festival program are the theater production “Traces” from Canada’s acrobatic Les 7 Doigts de la Main; the body-centric dance of the Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet’s “Violet Kid”; the singularly athletic Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s “Revelations”; solo theatrical performance of “Leo” by Germany’s Circle of Eleven; Zoe/Juniper’s “A Crack in Everything”; and Kyle Abraham’s “The Radio show.”
“I think the extraordinary thing about the Alvin Ailey company is how great the dancers are,” says Redden. “It’s often said of great actors that they can make reading the phone book compelling. The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater can do the equivalent of dancing a telephone book and make it riveting.
Redden also noted the physicality of Les Doigts de la Main.
” ‘Traces’ is the anti-Cirque du Soleil, which began with circus moves and made them polished. by contrast, ‘Trace’ is meant to seem somewhat raw in the sense that you get to know the individual personalities and quirks of the performers. You know who they are. They talk to you and to each other, and they do these amazing things.”
Maestros of music
The Spoleto Festival USA Orchestra, led by Kennedy, will present a contemporary concert program featuring the American premiere of John Cage’s 1991 orchestral trilogy, “Twenty-Six, Twenty-Eight and Twenty-Nine,” while the Bank of America Chamber Music Series, toplined by violinist Jennifer Frautschi and directed by Geoff Nuttall, offers 33 concerts of 11 programs performed twice daily in the Dock Street Theatre.
They will be joined in the musical lineup by “Doghouse,” composed by Jonny Greenwood of the English rock band Radiohead, and concerts by Grammy Award-winning vocalist k.d. lang, gospel singer Mavis Staples and New Orleans’ Rebirth Brass Band.
Also featured in the music component will be the modern American string band Joy Kills Sorrow and ukulele virtuoso Jake Shimabukuro, while the annual Wells Fargo Jazz Series offers returning artists such as Virginia Rodrigues and Renaud Garcia-Fons, as well as a bevy of talented newcomers.
Glass, Cage, Greenwood and Guo Wenjing are by no means the sole contemporary composers to enjoy premieres. Sharing the spotlight are works by Japanese composers Somei Satoh, Toshio Hosokawa and Toshi Ichiyanagi and British composer Tansy Davies.
Under the baton of Joseph Flummerfelt, Spoleto Festival USA artistic director for choral activities, the Westminster Choir joins forces with the Festival Orchestra and the Charleston Symphony Orchestra Chorus for a program featuring Maurice Durufle’s “Requiem” and Verdi’s emotional “Stabat Mater.”
Spoleto’s late-afternoon Intermezzi concerts present artists from the Festival Orchestra and the season’s operas in varied programs, including a performance of Arnold Schoenberg’s “Pierrot Lunaire.”
Meanwhile, the festival’s search for a new music director is on hold.
“We decided that we would wait until the Gaillard (Municipal Auditorium) renovation is completed,” says Redden. “We are going to be in a different mode for the next two years. There is a financial element to this as well. we have to find a music director who has a certain latitude to do things, and this will be constrained without the Gaillard. we are thinking of other ways to enrich the program.”
Reach Bill Thompson at 937-5707.
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