fireworks with songs for SVF12!

With all the notes being lifted into the stratosphere, that certainly seemed to be true!

The 12th Annual Savannah Voice Festival (SVF12) held its kickoff concert tonight...

and I was there!!!

That's because I am serving as usher (EW-sure, as Sherrill Milnes pronounces the word) again this year - hooray!

With this first of several events being held at Asbury Memorial Church, it was quite helpful for them to have me there to answer questions about locations of various rooms, or to give directions to the two stairwells, or anything else of that nature.

Sure, they could ask Randy Cannady, too, as he was the church's representative, but I was right there and ready to help!

Emily Gallagher was riding herd on the volunteers, as she had last year.

Not that there were many of us who needed a herder.

Just me, old pro Kim Owens, and the Penny & Lonnie team from the days at the Lucas.

Very nice!

(smile!)

So, what was the title of tonight's concert?

"Aria"

Just the one four-letter word, the word that most people associate with opera: aria.

Twenty singers were there to perform twenty arias, from nineteen different operas, written by fourteen different composers.

Of the three from Giacomo Puccini, I was only familiar with the song from "Madama Butterfly", thanks to last year's production.

Last year also helped me know the song from "Don Giovanni", but I knew the two songs from "Le Nozze Di Figaro" courtesy of the SVF spent in ZOOM.

Actually, SVF-8 is truly the reason I know Wolfgang Mozart's conniving Don so well.

(smile!)

The only other song I knew was one that i could have actually sung along with: "The Impossible Dream", from the last play the Asbury Memorial Theatre troupe ever did.

That means there were fifteen songs from fifteen operas that I did not know.

I doubt I was the only one who didn't know several of those pieces.

The manner in which the performances occurred left no time to even consider what might have been going on or what the singer was going on about.

As each singer completed their aria, they would take their bow and proceed to stage left as the next singer walked on from stage right.

Efficient, yes; helpful for the audience, not particularly.

I may make this suggestion to Maria Zouves for next year: have a longer pause between the performances, with the singer providing a short introduction to allow the song to have some context before launching into the piece.

I understand that this would have added to the length of the program (which still ran about 75 minutes), but a brief intermission would have handled that nicely.

There still would have been plenty of time for the reception that followed.

(smile!)

I very much enjoyed the chicken salad on the sourdough bread (which one of the singers said was made by Maria herself!).

However, my favorite on the table were the mariposas, of which I had two.

Those crunchy cookies with the croissant texture and slight sweet taste were exactly what I've been missing lately.

(smile!)

Now to put away my blue geo dress!

I will most likely wear it again on Sunday when I return to AsbMemCh for another SVF concert!

(smile!)