Menotti Blasts the Board, but Spoleto Fest Will Go On : Arts: The composer threatens to pull out while Charleston’s mayor pledges a ‘world-class’ celebration.

As he has on several occasions in the past, composer Gian Carlo Menotti, founder and artistic director of the Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston, S.C., launched a personal attack on its administrators and board of directors and threatened to take what he called “my” festival elsewhere.

On Sunday, Menotti released a statement from his home in Scotland denouncing the Spoleto board as “huge, bickering and ineffectual” and complaining that it had shown “overt hostility” to his leadership and artistic vision. Such outbursts are nothing new for the 82-year-old Menotti. In 1991, with the strong support of Charleston Mayor Joseph P. Riley, Menotti overruled his board and forced the resignation of its chairman, president and general manager. Twenty-two members of the board resigned at that time. This time, however, the Spoleto board--and Mayor Riley--seem content to let Menotti walk.

“We very much hope that Maestro Menotti will reconsider, but the show will go on here and we will put on a world-class arts festival this year and succeeding years,” Riley told the Charleston Post and Courier.

Spoleto board chairman Homer C. Burrous added: “We were very sad that Menotti decided to pull out of the festival but, make no mistake, the festival will go on here without a hiccup.”

The current crisis seems to have been instigated by former Spoleto Festival USA national press representative Tom Kerrigan, who was fired by the board last week for publicly demanding the resignation of executive director Marcus Overton and then leaking confidential documents to the Post and Courier.

Sunday night, Menotti issued a brief statement that read, in part: “I have now decided that the time has come for me to take my festival away from its present organization. . . . I hope this statement makes clear that I’m not leaving the festival. I’m taking the festival with me. They can go on and have their own festival, but it will not be the Spoleto Festival.”

But Riley said Menotti owns neither the festival nor the name Spoleto Festival USA, which he insisted would continue in Charleston.

“We own the trademark,” Burrous said in an interview Monday morning. “We’ve always known the day would come when we’d have to continue without Maestro Menotti, but we hoped it wouldn’t come so soon. We’d like to keep him on as long as we can, but not at any price.”

Neither Menotti, who also founded the Spoleto Festival in Italy, nor Kerrigan could be reached for this story.