As I write this, we’re 10 days into the Savannah Music Festival, with a stellar lineup ahead for the final week.
I had visions of writing a number of individual reviews by now, but work commitments and the cascade of the SMF itself have kept intervening. But I’ve still got lots of notes (if not lots of photos — the festival discourages most photography, although I did snag shots here and there for our Instagram), so here comes a big post with fragmentary reflections on the shows I’ve seen so far, in chronological order. (I also wrote a little about three of these shows in my latest Unplugged column in Do Savannah.)
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Cameron Carpenter at the Lucas Theatre
If organist Cameron Carpenter had been alive in the Middle Ages, he might have been an alchemist.
Or, more likely, he would have been an organist. (Now that I think about it, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find that Carpenter was alive during the Middle Ages — I can’t think of any performer who is a better candidate for vampire-like reinvention century after century.)
Carpenter said from the stage that he sees the organ as “the auditory equivalent of looking down a hallway” because the instrument has been for many centuries “at the vanguard of advanced human thought.”
The organ encompasses whole worlds for Carpenter: it’s “a musical city” and “an analogy for the universe.” And it’s also a puzzle and “a camp instrument” that captures a disproportionate number of gay musicians who might be drawn to the “quest for certainty” inherent in mastering the organ.
I could listen to Carpenter talk all day, but the show was obviously dominated not by talk but by the kind of stirring renditions of classical works that have propelled him to fame. At his 2013 SMF appearance, we could only see a video projection of Carpenter because he was confined to the fixed organ at Christ Church Episcopal on Johnson Square, but now his International Touring Organ is a reality — so organ and organist can take center stage, where they belong.
The setlist included works by Schubert (“Der Erlkönig” was a particular highlight, I thought), Tchaikovsky, Bach, Wagner (I think?), and, among others, Carpenter himself. He played his somewhat fanciful composition “Music for an Imaginary Film” near the end of the nearly two hour show.
Penetrating, powerful, occasionally mind-altering, visually spectacular — Carpenter’s show was a perfect way to kick off my own personal SMF, and I sure hope he comes back this way again. He fits oddly well into Savannah too, but that’s another story.
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Rokia Traoré at Trustees Theater
In his introduction of Rokia Traoré, SMF director Rob Gibson said that he had been trying to book the Malian rock star for the last decade — that’s quite a buildup — and then Traoré and her band came out and exceeded every expectation that I had of the show.
