Press
Emmanuel Villaume, one of the heroes of the 2008 festival, has served as Spoleto's music director for opera and orchestra since 2001.
Villaume made his American debut here conducting Mozart's "Le nozze di Figaro" in 1990, in the same performance that introduced me to a ravishing young soprano named Renee Fleming, and I've followed his career ever since.
In recent years he has been one of the best things about Washington National Opera, and last fall, he all-but-singlehandedly saved a production of "La Boheme" that had been hampered with unbelievably bleak and dismal staging by making the music sing out more convincingly than ever.
On Thursday night, Villaume led the Spoleto Festival USA Orchestra in a challenging program of familiar 20th century music by Claude Debussy, Bela Bartok and Igor Stravinsky that nevertheless seemed eternally fresh and exciting, as though the ink were still wet.
Villaume and his troupe delivered a performance of prismatic hues and exhilarating force. This is one of the best orchestras in America right now and it disbands after Sunday night
Tim Page, Charleston Post and Courier, June 7, 2008
It was obvious that Maestro Emmanuel Villaume has this luscious music [Debussy's La Mer] in his blood. He led an intense, burnished account that crackled with fierce energy and projected an aura of primeval power. His "orchestra of virtuosos" rose to the occasion, with absolutely first-rate playing from all sections. Villaume drew great, throbbing gushes of beautifully-shaped sound from them -- especially the strings and brasses. The strings' high tremolo passages were exquisite --even their section trills seemed synchronized in their voyage.
Lindsay Koob, Charleston City Paper, June 6, 2008
The first of two big performances by the Spoleto Festival USA Orchestra showed what a versatile group they are. With Emmanuel Villaume conducting and whipping the orchestra into a lather, Wednesday's audience experienced a sonically spectacular concert.
Villaume conducted a Brahms Fourth Symphony last year with a different Spoleto Festival USA orchestra, performing at white heat. The Brahms First this year became a vision of the past, as the orchestra played with a driven intensity and sublime virtuosity.
Villaume can draw remarkable music from an orchestra so that the composition emerges as if newly created.
William Furtwangler, Charleston Post and Courier, May 29, 2008
Spoleto USA's excellent music director, Emmanuel Villaume, will conduct a production [of Padmâvatî] at this year's Spoleto Festival in Italy.
Anne Midgette, Washington Post, May 26, 2008
Conductor Emmanuel Villaume's reading [of Carmen]...was bright and vividly colored,
as if lit by the Seville sun.
Fred Cohn, Opera News Online, April 2008
Among the great pleasures of regularly attending concerts is the occasional encounter with a performance that far surpasses expectations.
The concert by the Juilliard Orchestra at Avery Fisher Hall on Monday night did just that. I can’t think of another recent orchestral program that left me more exhilarated.
There was every reason to anticipate a fine experience: musicians of the Juilliard School are a dependable source of polished, enthusiastic playing. The conductor was Emmanuel Villaume, the music director of the Spoleto Festival USA. His performances in New York, with the Metropolitan Opera (where he is leading “Carmen”) and elsewhere, have generated positive response.
Mr. Villaume, a tall man who wields his sizable hands expressively, whipped up an impressive frenzy in the opening bars of Strauss’s “Don Juan.” His interpretation was brawny and voluptuous, without skimping on precision and clarity. Robust horns and the limpid solo playing of Ilana Setapen, the concertmaster, were among the highlights of a finely tuned account.
The electricity Mr. Villaume mustered in Berlioz’s “Royal Hunt and Storm,” from “Les Troyens,” was all the more impressive for the control with which he wielded it. Countless details surfaced with the impact of fresh revelations during a concluding performance of “La Mer” by Debussy, which ebbed and flowed with suitable capriciousness but never lost coherence.
Steve Smith, New York Times, February 20, 2008
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