Dispatch 1: Returning to Spoleto

WDAV Dispatch from Spoleto

Frank Dominguez reflects on WDAV's past and present coverage of the Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston, SC. Read Full Dispatch > As WDAV embarks on another season visiting the Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston, it’s inevitable to look back and reminisce. As the writer and producer of our blog posts and podcasts this year, I can’t help but remember my first visit to Spoleto in 2009. I had heard about the festival for years before that. My mother-in-law – a violinist and music teacher – made an annual pilgrimage to the Dock Street Theater for the chamber music series. But I had no idea about the breadth and scope of the festival until I began covering it for WDAV. In those days we had an entire team of hosts, producers, audio engineers and support staff gathering interviews, recording performances, and otherwise exploring the varied offerings of the festival. As you might imagine, the enterprise was expensive and proved impossible to sustain, and the festival staff struggled to accommodate our requests to record. So over time we scaled back our residency, and last year we didn’t visit at all, but continued to bring the festival to WDAV listeners through the excellent Spoleto Chamber Music Series produced by our colleagues at South Carolina Public Radio, and heard on WDAV Saturdays at 11 a.m. April through June. This year, however, we’re back, and with a slightly different approach: a series of previews, reviews and interviews focused on the current festival season, and available through our blog Of Note, and also through our WDAV Dispatch from Spoleto podcasts. I’m looking forward to sharing the sights and sounds with you, and we’ll still bring you past Spoleto performances through highlights played during our weekday programming, as well as the Saturday radio series. Let us know what you think about the new Spoleto Festival USA coverage on WDAV. Click on About the Station in the lower left corner of the home page, and then select Contact Us.