Spoleto Festival USA May 24 – June 9 in Charleston

For 17 days and nights beginning Friday, May 24 through Sunday, June 9, Spoleto Festival USA fills the historic theaters, churches and outdoor spaces in Charleston, South Carolina with performances by renowned artists as well as emerging performers. Take your choice of opera, theater, music theater, dance and visual arts, plus chamber, symphonic, choral and jazz music.

The 37th annual Festival will feature one of Spoleto’s largest lineups in recent history, with expanded dance and theater offerings and two original opera productions, as well as a wide range of classical and contemporary music.

The Opening Ceremonies take place at noon in front of Charleston’s City Hall. The newly retrofitted TD Arena will see its first performances on Friday night as Compagnie Käfig presents a program of hip-hop-influenced Brazilian dance. Following the evening’s performances, the Spoleto Opening Night Fête kicks off the 2013 season with an elegant street party with cocktail supper, live music, a full bar, and the company of Festival artists and patrons.

Spoleto Festival USA is known for introducing audiences to new and groundbreaking work, and the 2013 Festival offers a number of American premieres in a variety of genres, beginning with the contemporary opera Matsukaze by Toshio Hosokawa, one of Japan’s most prominent living composers. In dance, young tap virtuoso Jared Grimes makes his Spoleto debut premieringa new evening-length work created especially for the Festival.

The theater program offers the American premiere of a production of  Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream by England’s Bristol Old Vic in association with South Africa’s Handspring Puppet Company. One half of the operatic double-bill—Umberto Giordano’s Mese Mariano—will receive its first fully staged U.S. production. On the music front, John Kennedy, Spoleto Festival USA’s resident conductor and director of orchestral activities, will lead the Festival Orchestra in the American premiere performances of Pierre Boulez’s arrangement of Ravel’s Frontispice and Pēteris Vasks’Credo; and the Bank of America Chamber Music Series will feature the world premiere of a new work by composer-in-residence Samuel Carl Adams (son of composer John Adams, whose landmark piece Harmonielehre is being performed in a separate orchestral concert).

Find the full schedule and ticket information on the Spoleto USA website.