CHARLOTTE, N.C. (QUEEN CITY NEWS) — The Carolina Theatre is alive with the sound of music Friday night for the first time since 1978. It was the first performance at the uptown Charlotte landmark since its renovation.
“I saw where Renee Fleming was going to be here at the Carolina Theatre and I’m like ‘We’ve got to go one to see this grand palace restored, but also to hear Renee.’ It’s like an amazing night,” said Charlotte resident Jay Williams.
The Charlotte Symphony Orchestra gave its first performance at the theatre 93 years ago on March 20, 1932.
The city of Charlotte gifted the Carolina Theatre’s property to Foundation For The Carolinas in 2012 for $1, which began a massive $90 million philanthropic campaign to restore the theatre to its beloved glory. The deeply complex eight-year restoration process began in 2017.
It is now back open for the first time since 1978, and to say people are excited is an understatement.
For one night only, Grammy award-winning opera star Renee Fleming gave a special performance titled “A Homecoming.”
“During the pandemic, I had just moved to Virginia, and I always wanted to be outside. I found that the most appealing thing to be, wanting to be among the trees and to be experiencing nature. I also always thought about the fact that much of the music that we love and perform regularly is late 19th-century, early 20th-century art songs. So this is a marriage of poetry and music. All of those poets, I would say 95% of the time, frame the human experience through the lens of nature. I thought ‘Well, let’s compare that with how we feel about it today. What’s happening today?’ So we commissioned four or five different pieces, and this album called “Voice of Nature: The Anthropocene” with Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who’s the music director on it, won a Grammy,” Fleming said during her introduction.
They played a video made with the help of National Geographic during her opening song with just the pianist. The orchestra performed during the second portion of the performance.
For some concertgoers, it is certainly a homecoming.
“We came for the symphony tonight because my grandfather, Guillermo de Roxlo, was the first symphony conductor here. I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for Charlotte,” said Katherine Roxlo. She and her brothers traveled here for the event.
“Guillermo de Roxlo was a celebrated conductor, composer, and violinist in his home country of Spain. He immigrated to Charlotte, via Cuba, with his family after fleeing the Spanish Civil War. Upon learning that there was no symphony orchestra in Charlotte, he replied “All right. That is my place.” During his twelve-year tenure, de Roxlo consistently grew the Orchestra, adding concerts, a subscriber base, and taking the group on the road to perform in nearby towns in North and South Carolina,” according to the Charlotte Symphony website.
The Carolina Theater holds 900 people, and theater officials say it was nearly a sold-out event. While it has been closed for 47 years, art leaders deemed it to be architecturally significant and too sentimental to demolish.
One woman Queen City News spoke to says she’s lived here the majority of her life and remembers seeing performances here before the doors shut.
“To have the theater reopening, I mean, there were so many beautiful and wonderful memories here. Cinerama performed here and a funny movie with Vincent Price called “A House on the Hill” where they had a skeleton in a box that came out over the audience and the whole interior of design and decorating was so overwhelming back then that to have it be the way it is going to be now. I’m so excited,” said Charlotte native Julie Ritterskamp.
The performances don’t stop on Friday though. On Saturday, March 29, at 8 p.m., the Carolina Theatre will host another ticketed event: local and Grammy Award-winning musicians Mark and Maggie O’Connor will be in Charlotte.
The husband-and-wife duo will bring their genre-blending Beethoven & Bluegrass performance to the Carolina Theatre a full month before they perform it at New York City’s Carnegie Hall. The Country Music Association named Mark O’Connor its Musician of the Year six years in a row.
Most recently, he, Maggie, and their O’Connor Band won the Grammy Award for Best Bluegrass Album in 2016.
While the Carolina Theatre at Belk Place will reclaim its space in Uptown Charlotte as a live entertainment venue, an important use of the Carolina Theatre will also be hosting town halls, community events, speaker series, and civic engagement.
