Ash on our NEW SEASON
I’m so excited to share our 2022-23 season with you! Today I want to share some of the context around our concerts with you.
DECEMBER: Journey to Peace
We open in early December with “Journey to Peace.” Our decision to focus on the women enduring the current Russian crisis came as the world saw Ukrainian music and art at risk of being lost to the terrors of war. Ukrainian folk tunes are the basis of many melodies we sing today like “Carol of the Bells,” which is traditionally Ukrainian. We wanted to make sure the outcropping of beautiful art and culture would be sustained and remembered.
Of particular interest to me was focusing on the women who continue to create beautiful images like Olga Kovrun’s Tree of Life (2020), pictured here, all while supporting the efforts of the Ukrainian soldiers. Now exiled to Poland, Olga was both delighted and generous with us when we proposed using her gorgeous, classically Ukrainian painting as our signature image for this concert.
I was also compelled by the story of Hanna Havrylets, the world famous Ukrainian choral composer, who died in a hospital in Ukraine on the third day of the Russian invasion because there were no doctors to treat her brain aneurism. We want to uplift her music and ensure that it, and her untimely death, are remembered forever.
The peace we seek may seem unattainable during these times of conflict, but the women who support that peace through their art will be remembered forever. We will find peace and love eventually and these works will be a source of inspiration for that peace.
APRIL: Son to Mother is about love, grief, choice, and hope….
To love is a core human dilemma which we can all relate to. By its very nature, love inevitably leads to loss and grief. This grief, in turn, requires choice in how to handle it, which opens the way to hope – emerging from devastating loss with healing and renewal.
In 2006 I lost my younger brother Avery to suicide. It was the most painful experience of my life, and to this day I think about my brother all the time. Experiencing that level of grief and mourning with my family also opened a door of love and hope for our family. We came together even stronger, after bereavement and therapy, that love is still strong today. It was in our grieving process that we found the hope through each other to keep going, to keep hoping, to keep loving.
As a society we have experienced many levels of grief over the last few years due to the pandemic, financial stresses, political turmoil, racism, and more. How do we process these experiences and move forward with hope? How do we answer questions our children have about where we are now? Where do we go from here?
Creating a choral program about these themes was only possible because of my discovery of the beautiful poem by Maya Angelou called “Son to Mother.” In it, a person asks their mother for guidance in navigating a world full of strife and questions. We often find ourselves seeking guidance from our family and friends, asking questions about how to move forward through difficult times and seeking hope through the words of our most trusted supporters.
Throughout this program, the text of Angelou’s poem will be used to amplify our journey through grief to hope – embodied in a setting of the poem by our good friend and Swedish composer Henrik Dahlgren. Another powerful poem, “Mother to Son” (1922) by Langston Hughes, is almost like an answer from the past to the questions posed in Angelou’s writing. Both poems will be recited during our performances.
To further communicate our story from grief into hope, our programming team has selected music from Craig Hella Johnson’s oratorio Considering Matthew Shepard, John Lennon’s “Because,” and a new staged version of “Dona Nobis Pacem” by Ralph Vaughan Williams.
Joining us for these concerts will be soloists, dancers, and chamber orchestra, all heightened by the use of special lighting and projections.
I hope you will join us for this truly special concert experience in April. Our aim is that it will be a time of healing, growth, and hope as we come together in the spirit of love and understanding to be there for one another.