Conducted by Amanda Quist, Music Director of Spoleto Festival USA Chorus.

In her inaugural season as Music Director of the Spoleto Festival USA Chorus, Dr. Amanda Quist leads Storytelling—a program that honors legacy while looking toward the future. Through works by American composers and others who explore identity, memory, and belonging, the concerts celebrate the power of the human voice to connect, reflect, and inspire. Set within the soaring Gothic interior of St. Matthew’s Lutheran Church, one of Charleston’s most acoustically and architecturally stunning spaces, the Festival Chorus invites audiences to experience music as a shared act of community and renewal.

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Spoleto Festival USA Chorus: The Chorus Concerts

St. Matthew's Lutheran Church

Mozart’s Mass in C Minor is a dazzling masterpiece that resonates powerfully with America’s 250th anniversary. Premiered in 1783—the same year the British monarchy formally recognized the independence of the Thirteen Colonies—this work shares a historical moment with the birth of the United States.

Amanda Quist conducts her first performance as Music Director of the Festival Chorus, continuing the ensemble’s cherished traditions through her unique musical lens and deep commitment to choral excellence.

Mozart’s Mass in C Minor

College of Charleston

Spoleto Festival USA presents Opera Queensland’s production of Dido and Aeneas in association with Circa.

Heart-stopping acrobatics and Henry Purcell’s masterful score for Dido and Aeneas—rich, haunting, and unforgettable—soar to new heights in a visionary collaboration with the internationally acclaimed physical theater ensemble Circa. This is opera transformed: soaring voices, awe-inspiring physical artistry, and striking design collide in a riot of color, motion, and sound.

Dido and Aeneas

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

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

5 - 6 Jun, 2026

Spoleto Festival USA Chorus: The Chorus Concerts

May 29, 2026

Mozart’s Mass in C Minor

Spoleto Festival USA Chorus