I had to leave Grace Church, Mozart, Villaume, and John Kennedy early, though, since I wanted to be at another church, the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist, for the 6pm start of Piccolo Spoleto’s tribute to Robert T. Jones. Bob was the Post and Courier’s Spoleto overview critic from the festival’s earliest days, traveling to Charleston each year from New York City to do the job Blair Tindall is doing this year. In the early 90s, he and his longtime partner Jorge retired in Charleston, and he began writing a bi-weekly column on the arts in Charleston for the P&C in addition to his Spoleto coverage. During that time, while I was the editor of Charleston Magazine, I became friends with Bob when I hired him to write a retrospective feature for the magazine on his (at that time) nearly 20 years covering the Spoleto Festival for the P&C. Bob certainly had some stories to tell about the festival: seeing artists like Renee Fleming, Yo Yo Ma, Bobby McFerrin and many others play there for the first time, before they were household names, and other tales, not all of them fit for print in a family paper. It’s very likely that Bob saw more of the Spoleto Festival than any other human being, living or dead. He had a sharp wit and an equally sharp pen, and he was a good friend. So it was important to me to be at the Tribute Concert Ellen Dressler Moryl had scheduled as part of Piccolo’s Spotlight Concert Series.
Moryl gave a few brief remarks, then ceded the floor to longtime Post and Courier writer Carol Furtwangler, one of Bob’s best friends. Carol spoke eloquently about her friendship with Bob, ending with her hope that he “awaits us in whatever dimension music eternally plays.”
Afterward, members of the Chamber Music Society of Charleston performed beautiful renditions of Samuel Barber’s timeless Adagio for Strings, Philip Glass’ String Quartet No. 2 (a favorite of mine), a suite for wind sextet from Leos Janacek, and Hector Villa-Lobos’s Last Distribution of Flowers for flute and guitar. It was a touching farewell, one of many gestures Piccolo and Spoleto adminstrators have made this year to acknowledge Bob’s too-early death and his enormous contribution to Charleston and the two festivals.
Taken together, the two afternoon concerts also highlighted the importance of local churches to Piccolo and Spoleto. When you can’t get an expensive new symphony hall built, you gotta use what you’ve got. And churches certainly have the acoustics for classical music. Just don’t expect to sit comfortably in them for long.
Here what it looked like yesterday at Grace Church (left) and the Cathedral (right).
