ENTERTAINMENT

As Savannah Music Festival makes big changes, Spoleto Festival USA offers blueprint for future

Bill Dawers
For Do Savannah

The Savannah Music Festival last week announced an impressive first wave of artists scheduled to perform in 2022 and also announced the hiring of new executive director Gene Dobbs Bradford.

Bradford, president and CEO of Jazz St. Louis for more than 20 years, will join the SMF in February. But the SMF isn’t the only major performing arts festival on the southeast coast that has been in the news recently.

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Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston has been moving in new directions while embracing the traditions that have attracted broad community support and made the 17-day event a destination for visitors from around the world.

Mena Mark Hanna, formerly with Berlin’s Barenboim-Said Akademie, became Spoleto’s new general director in October. He took over from Nigel Redden, who worked for the festival for almost 40 years before deciding to retire after the COVID-19 pandemic forced the cancellation of the 2020 season. Redden said that the Black Lives Matter movement and the need for more diversity at the festival also contributed to his decision.

Opening Ceremonies; Spoleto Festival USA 2014 635494964989280024-Sun-drenched-crowds-enjoy-the-opening-ceremonites-of-the-2014-Spoleto-Festival-USA-credit-Julia-Lynn-Photography

“Perhaps it’s time now for someone else to take this on and have a different approach,” Redden told South Carolina Public Radio earlier this year.

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“Art has a very unique role to play in this conversation by really harnessing its transformative power to bridge differences,” Hanna said in a recent New York Times interview. “More needs to be done in terms of making sure that we have diverse perspectives at every single point of the life cycle of a work of art.”

Spoleto won’t release the full 2022 lineup until February, but the festival has already announced three ambitious operas for the upcoming season, including the much-anticipated “Omar” by Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels.

“Omar,” which was commissioned by Spoleto and originally scheduled to premiere at the festival in 2020, is based on the 1831 autobiography of Omar Ibn Said, a Muslim scholar enslaved in the Carolinas. Giddens is of course a monumental talent who has made several SMF appearances. I had tickets for “Omar” in 2020 and hope to make it to next year’s delayed premiere.

Rhiannon Giddens

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The other two operas are Karim Sulayman’s “Unholy Wars” and a new production of “La bohème” directed by Yuval Sharon.

“Each production, in its own way, rethinks the standard practice and repertoire of opera, questioning how it has traditionally been performed and what it can mean today,” Hanna said in a recent press release.

I think the sheer quality of the SMF programming under former director Rob Gibson and current artistic director Ryan McMaken has invited comparisons to Spoleto, although it is worth noting some stark differences in scale and mission.

The Charleston metro area has nearly twice as many residents as the Savannah area. The SMF emerged out of Savannah OnStage, which was founded more than 30 years ago, but the festival changed dramatically in 2003 after Gibson came on board. Gian Carlo Menotti founded Spoleto in 1977.

An evening concert at the College of Charleston Cistern Yard in Charleston, SC, as part of Spoleto Festival USA.
 Spoleto Festival USA 2014

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And Spoleto, which has a much larger year-round staff and a much larger budget than the SMF, has always been committed to programming genres like opera, theater and dance, in addition to music.

It remains to be seen how the two organizations will fare under new leadership as they move into new seasons, but the signs are all promising.

Bill Dawers writes the City Talk column for the Savannah Morning News. He can be reached via citytalksavannah@gmail.com and @billdawers on Twitter.