Salem is on the brink. Its people fear the shadows in the forest, but the real monsters are much closer to home. Returning to Spoleto after its lauded 2015 rendition of A Streetcar Named Desire, Scottish Ballet unleashes the emotional force of Arthur Miller’s masterpiece in this “blazing interpretation” (The Observer), choreographed by Helen Pickett and accompanied by members of the Spoleto Festival USA Orchestra.

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Scottish Ballet: The Crucible

Gaillard Center

Loosely based on the Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone, Ruinous Gods explores the psychological toll experienced by displaced refugee children. This vital world premiere opera follows a desperate mother’s attempts to revive her 12-year- old daughter who has fallen into a non-responsive sleep triggered by trauma. The child’s journey through an underworld-inspired dreamscape forms the backdrop for a groundbreaking score that weaves Arabic maqam and Western classical music traditions with diverse Middle Eastern influences, jazz, and improvisation. At turns painful, humorous, and hopeful, Ruinous Gods urges crucial conversations about how governments and societies treat migrant families.

Ruinous Gods

College of Charleston

In a radical retelling of Homer’s epic poem, acclaimed director Lisa Peterson and Tony Award-winning actor Denis O’Hare (Take Me Out) craft a work of “pure theater: shocking, glorious, primal, and deeply satisfying” (Time Out New York). O’Hare, who has brought powerful performances to numerous films and featured roles on TV’s The Good Wife and American Horror Story, shapes this breathtaking tour de force into a sweeping account of humanity’s unshakable attraction to violence, destruction, and chaos.

An Iliad

Dock Street Theatre

With his characteristic humor, swagger, and irreverence, Geoff Nuttall transformed Spoleto’s Bank of America Chamber Music series into something akin to rock-and-roll rather than buttoned-down classical. To honor Nuttall’s curatorial genius and infectious enthusiasm, some of his closest musical colleagues and special guest stars perform a concert of virtuosic debauchery—a brilliant tribute to a singular artist.

Celebrating Geoff Nuttall

New Orleans-based singer and multi-instrumentalist Leyla McCalla mines her Haitian American heritage for a sound at once earthy, elegant, and soulful—vibrating with Creole, Cajun, and American jazz and folk influences. Formerly a cellist with the Grammy-winning string band Carolina Chocolate Drops and part of the ensemble Our Native Daughters with Festival-favorite Rhiannon Giddens, the “liquid-voiced” McCalla topped NPR’s “Best Roots Music of 2022” with her latest solo project, Breaking the Thermometer, which the outlet deemed one of the year’s “most compelling.”

Leyla McCalla

Overflowing with ebullient musicianship and camaraderie, 11 programs feature a showstopping mix of canonic gems and bright contemporary compositions. This season, hear revered returning players and welcome new faces as they perform a compendium spanning pre-17th-century pieces to 21st- century triumphs. In celebration of Spoleto’s late Director of Chamber Music Geoff Nuttall, preeminent artists, including Alisa Weilerstein, Inon Barnatan, and Alexi Kenney, will honor their friend in the best way possible: with groundbreaking performances in a program both informed and inspired by Geoff.

Bank of America Chamber Music

Among the most romantic and tragic compositions, Robert Schumann’s Dichterliebe portrays one man’s phantasmic pursuit of the woman he loves. Tenor Jamez McCorkle, who dazzled in the title role of Omar last Festival, both sings and accompanies himself on piano in this brand-new, multilayered production featuring stunning stagecraft and projections by award-winning artist Miwa Matreyek.

A Poet’s Love

Queen Street Playhouse

Can music inform our sense of place? Time? Experience? And do those elements inform music in turn? Four Spoleto Festival USA Orchestra members seek to answer these questions with members of the Charleston community. Pairing emerging composers with entrepreneurs, artists, and activists, the “Tell Your Story” project creates powerful sonic collages and aural memoirs—“mechanisms for professional artists to lift up voices that otherwise go unheard” (The Post and Courier).

Tell Your Story

Festival Hall

Her feet are just that fast. Described by The New York Times as “a wonder, as humanly appealing as she is superhumanly skilled,” choreographer and performer Ayodele Casel returns to Spoleto with her latest work, Chasing Magic. Onstage with six tap dancers and a group of live musicians including jazz virtuoso and 2023 Grammy Award-winner Arturo O’Farrill, Casel explores the magic of tap dance and daily life, capturing that spark of connection and creation. A celebration of gratitude, friendship, and trust, Chasing Magic is a joyous feast for the eyes, ears, and soul.

Ayodele Casel: Chasing Magic

Rising operatic superstar Nicole Heaston takes on the titular role in this powerful existential drama, set to one of the most beautiful scores of the 20th century. Tucked away in a countryside mansion, Vanessa has waited 20 years for the return of her lover, Anatol. When his deadringer son arrives instead, a love triangle ensues between the conniving young suitor, Vanessa, and her impressionable niece.

American composer Samuel Barber won the Pulitzer Prize for Vanessa’s sweepingly lyrical score, which explores the full depths of the characters’ psyches in what librettist and Spoleto’s founder Gian Carlo Menotti characterized as a universal human dilemma.

Vanessa

Music in Time

Emmy Award-winning CBS News correspondent Martha Teichner hosts riveting, intimate conversations with the artists and companies of Spoleto Festival USA, illuminating the creative process and delving into the stories that form the 2022 productions. These discussions are free (tickets required).

Conversations With

Two iconic Baroque works frame this heavenly program, featuring 24 musicians from the Spoleto Festival USA Orchestra with the full Festival Chorus. George Frideric Handel’s monumental Dixit Dominus pairs with Henry Purcell’s Te Deum Laudamus and Jubilate, one of his final religious works, a revelation in its time for the scoring of hymn to orchestral accompaniment.

Spoleto Festival USA Chorus + Orchestra: Handel’s Dixit Dominus

Nickel Creek—the platinum-selling, internationally renowned trio of Chris Thile, Sara Watkins, and Sean Watkins—ushered in a new era of bluegrass infused with jazz, classical, pop, and rock for a sound all their own. As multi-Grammy-winning artists, the band has brought their progressive blend of acoustic roots, folk, and “newgrass” to a broad audience, greatly influencing the sound and trajectory of all three genres in the process. As part of their long-awaited reunion tour, the Watkins siblings and Thile—whose blistering mandolin was last heard at Spoleto with the Punch Brothers in 2019—fill the Cistern Yard for two unforgettable nights.

Nickel Creek

Grammy-nominated harpist Brandee Younger is revolutionizing the instrument for the 21st century, stretching its boundaries and musical limitations. An avid hip-hop fan as a teen, she studied classical music at the University of Hartford and soon ventured into the world of jazz. Since then, “the most heralded new voice on the harp” (NPR) has worked with cultural icons including Common, Beyonce, Lauryn Hill, and Stevie Wonder—not to mention some of jazz’s current greats, from Ravi Coltrane to Reggie Workman. In five concerts during Spoleto’s new Jazz at the Playhouse series, Younger presents her signature “dreamy, harp-forward, R&B-inflected jazz.”

Brandee Younger

Based on creator Odile Gakire Katese’s collected letters from survivors and perpetrators of Rwanda’s 1994 genocide, The Book of Life leads audiences on a remarkable journey of pain, grief, acceptance, and rebirth. In this deeply moving performance about finding hope in the aftermath of tragedy, the playwright and cultural entrepreneur’s story reverberates through spoken word and the rhythms of Ingoma Nshya, Rwanda’s first-ever female drumming ensemble founded by Katese. In a world racked with hatred and struggle, The Book of Life celebrates healing after trauma and the resilience of the human spirit.

The Book of Life

A New Orleans native, Courtney Bryan is “a pianist and composer of panoramic interests” (The New York Times), an artist shaping the future of American contemporary classical music. Bridging the sacred and the secular, Bryan’s compositions explore human emotions through sound, finding the connective tissue between jazz and traditional gospel, spirituals, and hymns. At the Queen Street Playhouse, Courtney performs solo twice, then adds in a quartet of saxophone, piano, electric bass, and drums.

Courtney Bryan

Led by 2023 Grammy-winning pianist/composer Kris Davis, this special concert is named for Davis’s 2019 breakthrough album, which was awarded “Jazz Album of the Year” by both The New York Times and NPR. “Bringing together wildly diverse musicians in tangled unity,” Davis often sets her improvisations to “grooves played with prismatic nuance” (The New York Times) by drummer Terri Lyne Carrington—a four-time Grammy winner and NEA Jazz Master herself. Turntablist and electronic musician Val Jeanty, bassist Trevor Dunn, and guitarist Julian Lage add layers of sonic texture for a thrilling and unexpected sound.

Kris Davis Diatom Ribbons

One of indie-music’s most in-demand violinists, multi-instrumentalist Kaoru Ishibashi (a.k.a. Kishi Bashi) has collaborated with such names as Regina Spektor, Sondre Lerche, and of Montreal. Since stepping out on his own, Bashi has “transformed into a mad pop scientist, giving life to earworms by looping together Eastern sounds, Philip Glass improvisations, and ’70s prog-rock inspiration” (NPR). His latest oeuvre celebrates his cultural heritage, using Japanese refrains as compositional and textural devices while exploring themes of love and self-discovery.

Kishi Bashi with Strings

Spoleto Festival USA’s Jazz Curator Larry Blumenfeld speaks with artists from the 2023 Wells Fargo Jazz Series. These discussions are free (tickets required).

Jazz Talks

Riviera Theater

The city of Paris was ablaze the night Igor Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps premiered in 1913: Riots that reportedly began in the theater’s aisles—visceral responses to the ballet’s unconventional rhythms and modern aesthetic—poured into the streets. Yet in its 110-year history, the work has become one of the most recognizable and beloved triumphs of the 20th century. In this program, the Festival’s Resident Conductor and Director of Orchestral Activities John Kennedy pairs this monumental work with a thrilling US premiere of Philip Glass’s Symphony No. 14.

The Rite of Spring

Celebrated as one of the most forward-thinking American musicians, Pulitzer Prize winner Henry Threadgill has forged a legendary career in unconventional territory—challenging bedrock ideas about jazz and exploring new approaches to composing and improvising. For this exciting Spoleto debut, Threadgill’s Zooid quintet (an unorthodox combination of reeds, acoustic guitar, cello, tuba, and drums) presents a performance at once radical, reverent, and remarkable.

Henry Threadgill Zooid

A composer rooted in the Czech folk tradition of his homeland, Antonin Dvořák arrived in New York in the early 1890s hungry for the “American sound.” Seeking inspiration in the music of Black and indigenous America, he soon composed his ninth symphony, an indelible work of spirit befitting the wide-open spaces of the New World and a triumph that remains among the most popular orchestral works of all time. In this concert, Maestra Mei-Ann Chen, the music director of the Chicago Sinfonietta, pairs Dvořák’s showpiece with works by American artists including Florence Price and Michael Abels.

New World Symphony

2022 NPR Tiny Desk Contest winner With “a powerful voice whose tender performance commands attention and fosters connection” (NPR), Alisa Amador captivates. Her music—a synthesis of rock, jazz, funk, and alternative folk—is deeply rooted in the Latin folk and jazz she grew up with in a family of musicians. Amador’s soulful singing, poetically incisive lyrics, and syncopated rhythms will fill you with longing and leave you wanting more

Alisa Amador

Experience Thomas Tallis’s majestic work, Spem in alium, considered the greatest piece of English early music, as performed by Spoleto’s masterful 40-strong choral ensemble. This Renaissance motet begins an evening exploring choral density: each subsequent work—by contemporary composers David Lang, Caroline Shaw, and Jonathan Dove—incrementally strips vocal parts, leaving only a soloist for the final piece.

Spoleto Festival USA Chorus: Density 40:1

St. Matthew's Lutheran Church

Exalted on “Best of” lists at The New York Times, Washington Post, and Time, Only an Octave Apart sparkles from start to finish. In this “breathtaking cabaret-fantasia” (New York Magazine), Justin Vivan Bond—“the greatest cabaret artist of their generation” (The New Yorker)—pairs with the ever-brilliant, world-class countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo for a hilarious, vulnerable, and utterly spectacular opera-meets-cabaret-meets-pop hybrid that “shatters categorical constraints” (Broadway World). Co-created by Zack Winokur, Only an Octave Apart revels in the coexistence of contrasts, celebrating the historical and the hysterical, countertenor to counterculture.

Only an Octave Apart

At 25 years old, Immanuel Wilkins is already one of the most highly regarded saxophonists and composers in jazz today—his album, The 7th Hand, was included among the 10 Best of 2022 by the The New York Times and NPR’s Nate Chinen’s Favorite Music of the Year. Filled with empathy and conviction, Wilkins’s music draws inspiration from critical thought and spiritual traditions. Experience the musical wunderkind championed by eminent artists including Jason Moran as he performs with his acclaimed quartet in brilliant improvisatory synergy.

Immanuel Wilkins Quartet

After sold-out runs at Spoleto in 2014 and 2018, the high-octane Australian physical theater company returns, this time with the electric Out of Chaos—a work the troupe describes as “our boldest and most ambitious yet.” Hard-edged, explosive acrobatics collide with intimate, verbal confessions to create insight into how things—people and planets, sound and light—come together. This US premiere bounces between chaotic creation and a seemingly ordered understanding of the here and now, all the while hinting at the strange spaces in between.

Gravity & Other Myths: Out of Chaos

Distinguished pianist and NEA Jazz Master Abdullah Ibrahim remains at the zenith of his career—recently releasing an acclaimed album, Solotude, and celebrating his 88th birthday while on a world tour. A hero to the anti- apartheid movement, Ibrahim’s first album—released under the name Dollar Brand—was censured by the South African government. Years later, he performed at Nelson Mandela’s inauguration. Join us in welcoming Ibrahim and his band Ekaya to hear a true “modern master—steeped in blues, with a classicist’s touch and poet’s sense of phrasing” (The Wall Street Journal).

Abdullah Ibrahim and Ekaya

A Charleston son returns. Baltimore Symphony Orchestra Music Director Designate Jonathon Heyward remembers the first time he stepped onto a conductor’s rostrum: as an 8th-grader attending music class at Charleston County School of the Arts. Fast forward 17 years, and the Holy City phenom is making history as one of the youngest music directors of a major American orchestra. In his Spoleto debut, Heyward leads the full Festival Orchestra in Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, an epic symphonic self-portrait teeming with unbridled joy and tenderness, as well as Edvard Grieg’s piano concerto, featuring sought-after soloist and fellow Charlestonian Micah McLaurin.

Spoleto Festival USA

May 24 - Jun 1, 2024

Ruinous Gods

May 25 - Jun 3, 2024

An Iliad

May 26, 2024

Celebrating Geoff Nuttall

May 26, 2024

Leyla McCalla

May 26 - Jun 11, 2024

Bank of America Chamber Music

Spoleto Festival USA

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