Word: spoleto
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...biggest stabile yet, Teodelapio, Duke of Spoleto, created for the 1962 Spoleto Festival, weighs 30 tons, looms 59 ft. high, and could only be assembled for the festival with the help of shipyard cranes in Genoa. Calder's first, more sylphlike stabile was created in 1931 when he was absorbing surrealism from Joan Miro and Jean Arp. From them he learned the art of expressing the forms of living things in the context and materials of the machine age. As the stabiles' dimensions have grown more mammoth, so have their artistic strength and lean, linear elegance...
During the evenings at Gian Carlo Menotti's Spoleto Festival of Two Worlds, the goings-on were grand. Festive Roman audiences wildly applauded Luchino Visconti's lavish production of La Traviata. The Messiah was sung on the moonlit Piazza del Duomo that it might satisfy all the senses. When the festival's sixth season neared its close, Founder Menotti looked ahead anxiously. "Everyone," he sighed last week, "expects exceptional productions. It's really tough figuring out how I will keep it up during the next ten years...
...Board. But this year, at least, one of the most highly acclaimed offerings at Spoleto was one of the least glamorous. At the unlikely hour of noon, S.R.O. audiences jammed the 370-seat white-and-gold Teatro Caio Melisso for one-hour chamber-music concerts. Most came in shirtsleeves, and the musicians were equally casual. Programs were not printed, but scrawled on a blackboard outside the theater only a few hours before curtain time. They were still subject to change whenever someone in the audience shouted a request loudly enough...
...chamber music and was one of its greatest strengths. But the rapport was broken when chamber music moved into large concert halls, for which it was never intended. Four seasons ago, deciding that "Italy has gone through great decadence in chamber music," Menotti launched the midday series at Spoleto as a long-shot restorative. Each summer since, about 50 similarly dedicated instrumentalists and singers from abroad have turned up for the series on nothing more than Menotti's promise of bed and board. They have performed everything from 13th century motets to Korean twelve-tone, are directed by Georgia...
Classical Jam Session. This season big-name musicians performing at the festival's full-dress evening productions began to treat the chamber-music series as a sort of classical jam session. Thomas Schippers, who conducted the Spoleto Messiah, stopped by to play piano duets with a series regular, John Browning. Last week Browning backed up U.S. Conductor Robert La Marchina (Traviata), who was up early for the sake of a tuneful Rachmaninoff piano-cello sonata. What's more, the musicians' enthusiasm for the series seems to be shared by an Italian concert public long uninterested in chamber...