Some tremendous — really, tremendous — coverage for the Savannah Music Festival and for the city generally this morning in the Wall Street Journal from Barrymore Laurence Scherer.
From The First Sounds of Spring:
In flower for roughly three weeks from late March through early April, the Savannah Music Festival, now in its 24th season, is pretty much the earliest warm-weather music festival in the country. Depending on your personal tastes, you can fill your plate with superb classical concerts, jazz and a panoply of indigenous regional and world music, in performance venues that include historic churches and restored movie palaces.
I stepped off my flight from New York on Friday and almost directly into the handsomely restored Christ Church Episcopal, an 1838 Greek-Revival masterpiece by local architect James Hamilton Couper. The American program was performed by one of the festival’s two associate artistic directors, violinist Daniel Hope, and a group of gifted friends, including pianist Sebastian Knauer and mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter.
Scherer mentions a number of excellent acts in a variety of venues, including Ahmad Jamal, classical programs at Trinity and Christ Church, Bill T. Jones, the Sissoke/Segal duet at Morris, and others.
His final paragraph, with great mentions of the Owens-Thomas House and the Flannery O’Connor Childhood Home:
Before boarding my plane, I managed to squeeze in a visit to the splendid Owens-Thomas House, a neoclassical mansion designed by the Anglo-American architect William Jay. His early work with the London architect John Soane led to such innovations here as a clever skylight over the dining-room sideboard, and a superb arching bridge connecting the front and rear foyers on the second floor. Another nonmusical highlight of the trip: a witty, revelatory lecture on the writer Flannery O’Connor, presented at her birthplace by Christopher Hope, the distinguished novelist and poet, who is also Daniel Hope’s father.
This first rich taste of Savannah has left me craving more.