In the Chamber at Spoleto

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."

Bed & 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.

Just such intimacy between musicians and audiences once characterized performances of 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-born Pianist Charles Wadsworth, a noted lieder accompanist who performed at one of Jackie Kennedy's White House soirees.

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 music. "One of the most original and happily realized formulas of the festival," glowed Rome's II Giornale d'ltalia. The Italian radio network helpfully broadcast most of the chamber music from Spoleto; and a bank manager in Rome, getting wind of an especially good program of quartets, promptly closed his branch and rushed off to the festival matinee with his entire staff in tow.

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