Press
A lovely adieu
Sunday night at the Gaillard Auditorium, the last concert for Spoleto Festival USA's music director for opera and orchestra Emmanuel Villaume started off with the first work he conducted here 20 years ago, Wagner's "Siegfried Idyll." The concert ended in a triumph of repeated standing ovations.
William Furtwangler, Charleston Post and Courier
Bringing Down the House
The “best-ever” Spoleto Festival Orchestra struts its magnificent stuff
Lindsay Koob, Charleston City Paper
Maestro Emmanuel Villaume delivers a final memorable concert
A capacity crowd packed the Gaillard Auditorium Sunday to bid farewell to Maestro Emmanuel Villaume as he showed off the magnificent orchestra that he's largely responsible for building.
Lindsay Koob, Charleston City Paper
Meyerbeer: Il Crociato in Egitto
(CD: Naxos 8.660245-47(3))
Since Richard Bonynge can't go on conducting this sort of opera forever, we're fortunate that Emmanuel Villaume shows such an affinity for it. It's hard to imagine a more attentive partner than Villaume for moments such as Armando's entrance scene, a difficult piece even if it didn't come in the singer's first moments onstage. Villaume is a reassuring presence all evening, but he should be specially commended for his handling of the long Act I finale. He shows the sort of musicologically astute understanding of tempo relationships for which conductors are acknowledged when they restudy the Beethoven symphonies, but which often passes unnoticed in the opera house.
...Villaume knows how to weight and lengthen the chords to minimize the possibility of wayward vocal intonation...
William R. Braun, Opera News
Conductor Emmanuel Villaume did a splendidly schmaltzy job with the score.
Mark Thomas Ketterson, Opera News
At Spoleto, a Departing Director and a Premiere
James R. Oestreich, New York Times
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