I go to Savannah not to reinforce my listening taste, but to hear music I wouldn’t ordinarily encounter back home

SAVANNAH There are cities in which festivals take place — Toronto being one of them — and then there are festival cities, such as Savannah.

Savannah? Well, yes, the Savannah Music Festival takes place in one of the most picturesque cities in the American South and therein lies much of its appeal. Think about them — Venice, Cannes, Bayreuth, Salzburg — all cities with major festivals and all rather picturesque and small.

You don’t need a car to navigate the Savannah Music Festival. There were eight venues this season throughout the downtown historic district, all of them walkable.

Ah yes, historic. Savannah may lack the antiquity of Venice, but 22 of the 24 oak-shaded squares laid out by General Oglethorpe when he founded the colony of Georgia in 1750 are still there, surrounded by one of the best preserved collections of period houses in the United States.

You can walk past places where George Washington was entertained. You can see monuments to heroes of the Revolutionary War. You can even visit the house where Jim Williams pulled out a German Luger in his study and shot dead his reckless lover, Danny Hansford.

OK, so that wasn’t so very historic, but if you recall the John Berendt novel “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,” or the Clint Eastwood film inspired by it, you will agree that the bloodstained house itself is historic, an elegant mansion dating from 1860.

The festival has yet to incorporate the Mercer-Williams House into its ambit, but the range of venues stretches from an early 19th-century Methodist church to an outdoor plaza adjacent to the Savannah River and a converted iron foundry.

And what makes it special, to my mind, is its range of programming. I go to Savannah not to reinforce my listening taste, but to broaden it by hearing music I wouldn’t ordinarily encounter back home.

As something of a classical snob, I would scarcely think of beginning a Toronto day with a noon-hour jazz concert by the Emmet Cohen Trio, continuing my day with an afternoon bluegrass romp by Russell Moore and IIIrd Tyme Out, and concluding my evening with vocal stylings by Samara Joy.

That’s right, the music goes on throughout the day, sometimes making it difficult to squeeze in a few calories beyond an ice cream cone from Leopold’s.

The classical music lover is not neglected, either. A series of chamber music programs titled “Philip Dukes and Friends” threads its way through the 17 days, this year between March 24 and April 9, the friends including such notable musicians as members of London’s Academy of St. Martin in the Fields Wind Ensemble.

Pianists well known to Toronto such as Benjamin Grosvenor and Olga Kern also appeared this season, along with an annual visitor, the major symphonic ensemble south of the Mason-Dixon Line, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, under the leadership of is former music director, Robert Spano.

The highlight of its program? Some might say Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade,” but how about a new mandolin concerto by Pulitzer Prize winner Jennifer Higdon, played by the Israeli virtuoso Avi Avital?

By the way, the next time the Atlantans visit Savannah they will likely be under the leadership of their new music director, the French contralto Nathalie Stutzmann, who toured Europe with Toronto’s Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra. So much for the late Anna Russell’s accusation that singers have resonance where their brains ought to be.

And as for the mandolin, it seems to be enjoying something of a revival these days. The festival even offered a mandolin recital by Mike Marshall and his spouse Caterina Lichtenberg, who played two of Beethoven’s little known pieces for the instrument, accompanied by fortepiano.

This was the 33rd season of the Savannah Music Festival. Something of a post-pandemic comeback year, it lacked some of the community-conscious features of the past, such as an acoustic music seminar and a high school jazz band competition. But the idea of outreach remains part of its mission.

Now a year-round enterprise, it sponsors a jazz academy for local students in grades 5 to 12 as well as a music education program titled Music Explorers for kindergarten to second-graders.

Of course, a festival should offer experiences unavailable in the rest of the year and the Savannah Music Festival certainly does that. On my final night beneath the sheltering oaks, as accordionist C.J. Chenier and the Red Hot Louisiana Band tore things up, I attended my first Zydeco dance party.

No, boss, I didn’t dance.

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