The 2018 Savanah VOICE Festival capped off its expanded and highly successful sixth season with a spectacular Grand Finale Concert and delicious Festival Gala Dinner, sponsored by Naomi and Barry R. Cohen, at The Landings Plantation Club on Sunday, Aug. 26. The 2018 festival – themed “Stories Great and Small” — concluded by entertaining guests with highlights from three weeks of sharing beautiful stories through operas, musical theater and song.

Excited guests were presented with glimpses of the VOICE Festival’s 2019 Opera Season with Tim Guidera from WTOC leading the charge in the announcement. As was the case with the 2018 season, the next annual celebration of classical music will run for three weeks to fit in all of the shows, recitals, classes and activities. It is slated for Aug. 3-25 2019 in popular Savannah locations. 

Savannah VOICE Festival’s vibrant new entity – the Savannah Opera – will continue with its staging of high quality operatic productions for the Hostess City with four different operas. The 2019's main festival opera will be the beloved Italian opera, Pagliacci (literal translation: Clowns), by Ruggero Leoncavallo. Pagliacci remains the only opera composed by Leoncavallo that is still widely performed. As an additional treat for audiences that evening, Composer in Residence, Michael Ching, is slated to present his original one-act "short" opera as a prelude, in English and entitled Birthday Clown. 

Included in the 2019 opera lineup will be Lee Hoiby’s comic, one-act opera, Bon Appetit!, a one-woman opera, adapted from an episode of Julia Child’s television show “The French Chef.” This food and beverage event is sure to leave audiences delighted.

After the success of last season’s collaboration with Chatham County schools through the production of the opera, Hansel & Gretel, the festival is planning to offer The Little Prince. This two-act opera by Rachel Portman with an English libretto by Nicholas Wright is based on the 1943 book by the same name, written by Antione de Saint-Exupery. Subtitled, “A Magical Opera,” this charming story which will be a VOICE studio opera with community involvement, is suitable for the whole family. 

Rounding out the diverse 2019 opera season will be a marvelous rendition of Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites, a French opera in three acts, completed in 1956. As the composer dictated upon writing, the opera will be performed in English, the language of the audience.  The opera tells a fictionalized version of the story of the Martyrs of Compiègne, Carmelite nuns who, in 1794 during the closing days of the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution, were guillotined in Paris for refusing to renounce their vocation.

The seventh annual Voice Festival will also include plenty of longstanding festival favorites. Audiences will welcome the return of the ever-popular Broadway Show, Voices in Sacred Song, Masters in Recital and Death by Aria, as well as a brand-new Salon Opera Series. For a delightful lighter option, and following this year’s popular concert of 1960s music, the 2019 Savannah Voice Festival will feature some fabulous vocal performances from the 1950s.

“The 2018 Savannah VOICE Festival ended on a tremendously high note, especially as we produced four operas under our new Savannah Opera brand,” said SVF co-founder and Executive Director Maria Zouves. “A wonderful anticipation is now building for a dazzling 2019 Voice Festival — with the expectation that, next year, new and old festival friends alike will be elated by the most exciting and satisfying season yet!”