Savannah festival offers something for everyone
Pinchas Zukerman and his wife, cellist Amanda Forsyth, are two-thirds of the Zukerman Trio.
Savannah likes to call itself America’s hostess city, although back in Prohibition days the evangelist Billy Sunday also characterized it as the wickedest city in America.
If these aren’t reasons enough to head for the airport (Air Canada now offers direct flights from Toronto), consider one of the continent’s most innovative cultural enterprises, the Savannah Music Festival.
As its name suggests, this is an enterprise in the business of peddling sound. Last week at the annual 17-day event I managed to squeeze into my calendar the sounds of upwards of a dozen diverse concerts, ranging from a piano recital by the Canadian virtuoso MarcAndre Hamelin to a noon-hour tootle by the American Brass Quintet, to a Beethoven and Bernstein program by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra conducted by Robert Spano.
So far so predictable. But in that same week I also heard the conductorless vocal ensemble Stile Antico sing 18 motets by the Spanish Renaissance composer Tomas Luis de Victoria, as well as experienced the high-powered 18-member Maria Schneider Orchestra playing music that stretched the borders of jazz, and had my ears piqued by Anna (RobertsGevalt) and Elizabeth (LaPrelle), a traditional folk duo who augmented their vocal and instrumental work by turning illustrated handcranked scrolls picturesquely known as “crankies.’’
I don’t know about the soup, but Anna and Elizabeth certainly supplied the nuts at this banquet. And a banquet it surely was, offering a range of musical courses virtually unique in my gluttonous experience.
Why such a diverse program? To Rob Gibson, the festival’s director for the past 16 of its 29 years, a basic reason is sheer practicality. With a small city population, Georgia’s first urban centre could hardly play host to a specialized festival over so many days. Something for everyone is a logical rationale. The best preparation for a visitor is to bring open ears. Yes, Hamelin played predictable Liszt and Debussy, but he also played a rarely heard sonata by the almost forgotten Russian composer Samuil Feinberg. And violinist and festival associate director Daniel Hope didn’t just program Bartok and Ravel, he had them keep company in a Balkan Roots concert with the unfamiliar likes of Yannick Constantinides and Pancho Vladigerov.
The Balkan Roots concert brought together classical and traditional musics — what Gibson calls a “collision of cultures’’ — a regular feature of his programming.
On Thursday, as a further example, I began my day with a concert by the 75-year-old jazz master Dr. Lonnie Smith and his trio, continued with an afternoon classical recital of Beethoven, Dvorak and Schubert by the Zukerman Trio and spent the evening with Manual Cinema, a performance collective combining shadow puppetry and film with a live original score.
The Zukerman Trio, by the way, is two-thirds Canadian. During his years as music director of Ottawa’ s National Arts Centre Orchestra, the Tel Aviv-born violinist-conductor Pinchas Zukerman married his principal cellist Amanda Forsyth and began collaborating as well with pianist Angela Cheng.
In introducing the trio, Hope recalled meeting Zukerman at the age of 10 and having to wait 34 years to collaborate with him onstage. Their Brahms and Schubert concert numbered among the week’s highlights.
Another of those highlights was violist Robert McDuffie’s performance of Leonard Bernstein’s Serenade (after Plato’s Symposium) with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, an underperformed score finally being given its due as part of the celebrations marking what would have been the American composer’s 100th birthday.
The Atlanta Symphony, one of the finest in the South, has been a happily anticipated feature of the festival for 13 years, though this year it shared orchestral duties with the debuting Zurich Chamber Orchestra, of which the versatile Hope is music director.
Savannah’s isn’t primarily an orchestral festival, of course. With close to 90 events in a variety of genres, performed in a variety of venues throughout the oak-shaded historical district, the Savannah Music Festival represents a kind of live musical encyclopedia.
It also represents an investment in music’s future. A dozen high school bands from across the continent take part in workshops and performances as part of the annual Swing Central Jazz program, and traditional musicians from as far afield likewise take part in an Acoustic Music Seminar.
“We’ve become so segmented in our world,’’ Gibson argues, “that it’s good to be reminded of what connects us. Music does that.’’
And it is difficult to think of a place where musical connections can be made across such a wide spectrum as in this history-rich oasis on the banks of the Savannah River.