A Shovel of Stars Overhead: Where to? What Next?

PUBLIC PERFORMANCES AT THE EURYTHMY SPRING VALLEY ENSEMBLE’S MID-WEST TOUR

• Saturday, October 19, 2024, at 7 pm
  The Commons Theater
  401 East Jefferson Street, Viroqua, WI 54665

• Tuesday, October 22, 2024, at 6:30 pm
  Lettie Jensen Community Center
  487 N Main Street, Amherst, WI 54406

• Sunday, October 27, 2024, at 4 pm
  Towsley Auditorium, Washtenaw Community College
  4800 E Huron River Drive, Ann Arbor, MI 48105

• Saturday, November 16, 2024, at 8 pm
  Threefold Auditorium
  260 Hungry Hollow Road, Chestnut Ridge, NY 10977

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The ESV Ensemble’s performance “A Shovel of Stars Overhead: Where to? What next?” embodies the longing, questioning, and bewilderment that belong to this moment in America, while asking where, from whom, and how something greater can come to be. The program is inspired by the words and compositions of a diversity of artists who poignantly reflect the tensions of their own time. These include the beloved and influential Langston Hughes, statesman Archibald MacLeish, the modern lyric Denise Levertov, and great American bard Walt Whitman. Levertov and other poets in the program orient us to the transcendent presence of the invisible in our midst. Evocative 20th-century American composer Henry Cowell sets the stage, while contemporary composer Grigory Smirnov threads through the tensions to a quieter, inner place. The rich harmonies of Sibelius and Chopin weave past into future, and east into west, leading us to the grandeur, purpose, and elemental urge in Antonin Dvorak’s final movement of the “Dumky” piano trio. Written not long before Dvorak’s maiden voyage to America, the trio’s changing harmonies and rhythms seem to anticipate the dawning vistas of a new land, and reflect something of the elusive and vast, young and surging, fighting but maturing American spirit.