I’ve spent the last 30 minutes or so listening to a sublime 2011 Savannah Music Festival piano recital by Nikolai Lugansky.
That’s one of five great performances pulled together in one post — Sounds Of Savannah: Concerts From An Eclectic Music Festival — on the NPR Classical blog by Producer Tom Huizenga. There are also links to beautifully recorded performances by Stile Antico, Simone Dinnerstein, Kristian Bezuidenhout, and Ebene Quartet. (As I write this, the blog post is the top story on the NPR Music homepage.)
Huizenga says this in part about the SMF:
The city of Savannah, Ga. conjures up images of the sleepy Old South — sultry summer nights and Spanish moss dripping like lace from cypress trees. But a few months before summer hits Savannah each year, you’ll find little that’s sleepy at all, as the entire city comes alive in music.
Late in March, the Savannah Music Festival unpacks an extraordinarily broad range of musicians, spreading them over a two-week period in 15 different venues throughout the city’s historic district.
And there’s one comment that’s been posted already today, by a self-identified Charlestonian, which reads in part: “in Charleston we have the Spoleto Festival shortly afterward and the Charleston press is very hush hush about the Savannah Festival. There is almost no publicity visible in Charleston. Luckily, you can’t keep something this good a secret.”