Greenville Symphony

Clarice Assad’s Circus Fantasia (2023) is a vibrant, sevenminute chamber orchestra work that captures the wonder, nostalgia, and kinetic energy of the circus.

Commissioned by the Allentown Symphony, the piece reflects Assad’s deep personal connection to the art form. Growing up in rural Rio de Janeiro, she recalls the circus as one of the few cultural events that regularly reached her community, bringing with it a sense of magic and possibility. Those memories — of acrobatics, dance, theater, and the joyful chaos of performance — shape the spirit of the composition.

The music embraces the circus’s dual nature: its timeless appeal and its ongoing struggle to adapt in a rapidly changing world. Assad highlights how the circus continually reinvents itself to survive, evolving its storytelling and spectacle while preserving its core sense of wonder.

Circus Fantasia mirrors this resilience through shifting textures, lively rhythms, and colorful orchestration that evoke movement, suspense, and playful unpredictability.

Assad’s background in jazz, classical, world music, and Brazilian traditions informs the piece’s eclectic sound world, giving it both sophistication and accessibility. The result is a compact but richly imaginative work that celebrates creativity, community, and the enduring power of performance.

music for young water that danced beneath my feet
Katherine Balch (born 1991)

Katherine Balch’s music for young water that danced beneath my feet (2021) is an eightminute work for two percussionists, harp, celesta, and strings that explores the delicate, shimmering textures of the natural world. Cocommissioned by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra and the Bravo! Vail Music Festival, it premiered on June 30, 2022 under conductor Fabio Luisi.

The piece’s sound world is built from an imaginative palette of timbres: prepared xylophone, glass bottles, capiz shell chimes, rocks, guiro, and resonant metals. These materials evoke the tactile, unpredictable qualities of water — its ripples, splashes, and shifting currents. Balch often draws inspiration from sensory experiences, and this work reflects her fascination with small, ephemeral details in nature.

Through gently layered textures and subtle rhythmic interplay, the music creates an atmosphere that feels both intimate and expansive. The result is a contemplative, quietly luminous piece that invites listeners to notice the fragile, dancing motions of water beneath their feet.

The Western Gospel (World premiere)
Ivan Enrique Rodriguez (born 1990)

The composer provided the following comments about this world-premiere piece:

“The United States has long understood itself through sound. Long before ideas are argued or histories debated, music establishes a sense of identity, purpose, and belonging. Certain melodies and gestures feel immediately familiar, carrying with them assumptions of hope, virtue, resolve, and moral clarity. They do not need explanation. They announce themselves as truth.

“The Western Gospel reflects on this shared inheritance and the confidence with which it is carried. The work unfolds as a journey through a sound world many listeners will recognize instinctively. These are musical voices that have accompanied moments of celebration, mourning, promise, and triumph. They form part of a collective memory that reassures, uplifts, and affirms a deeply held belief in direction and destiny.

“Such music is not merely heard but preserved. It is passed down, protected, and reaffirmed by those who recognize it as their own. In this way, listening becomes an act of participation, a quiet stewardship of tradition that binds past and present together through shared understanding.

“The term ‘gospel’ is used in its broadest sense, as a way of describing any story that presents itself as certain, foundational, and beyond question. The music considers how identity is sustained through repetition and recognition. What we know, we trust. What we trust, we defend. The piece invites listeners to reflect on how easily familiarity becomes conviction.

“Throughout the work, moments of warmth, grandeur, and reassurance are allowed to speak fully and unapologetically. At the same time, attentive listening may reveal that not all voices align comfortably. Echoes surface, overlap, and blur. Some may feel unexpectedly close. Others may appear in unfamiliar light. The music does not point to these moments directly, but leaves space for recognition, asking the listener to decide what is being remembered and why.

“The journey culminates with a powerful, almost overwhelming sense of affirmation. The closing gestures feel ceremonial and resolute, drawing strength from clarity, confidence, and collective resolve. Whether this culmination represents arrival, fulfillment, insistence, or endurance is left deliberately unresolved. Like any gospel, its authority depends not on explanation, but on belief, and on the listener’s willingness to hear what lies both within and beneath the sound of what already feels true.”

Tell Me Again
Lembit Beecher (born 1980)

Lembit Beecher’s Tell Me Again (2021) is a 25minute cello concerto written for Karen Ouzounian and premiered by the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra under Eric Jacobsen. The work unfolds in three movements — “In Which a Story Emerges,” A Song Sung with Others,” and “In Motion” — and is rooted in Beecher’s lifelong engagement with family history and migration.

Beecher and Ouzounian share backgrounds shaped by stories of displacement: Beecher’s grandmother fled Estonia during World War II, spending years in displacedperson camps before immigrating to the United States, while Ouzounian’s Armenian family left Turkey during the genocide and later emigrated from Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War. These intertwined histories inform the concerto’s emotional landscape, which blends lyricism, memory, and quiet resilience.

Musically, the piece moves fluidly between introspective passages and more animated, narrativedriven sections. Beecher’s sensitivity to storytelling — both personal and historical — gives Tell Me Again a reflective, intimate character, turning the concerto into a meditation on how family narratives are carried, reshaped, and retold across generations.

Paul Hyde, a longtime arts journalist, is an English instructor at Tri-County Technical College. He writes regularly for the Greenville Journal, the S.C. Daily Gazette, EarRelevant, ArtsATL, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Readers may write to him at paulhydeus@yahoo.com.

A chat with Arthur Ross and Seth Russell

2025-2026 Season at Glance

Season at a Glance

Concert Hall Series
Saturday performances at 7:30
Sunday at 3:00 pm

Opening Night: Hollywood Retrospective
October 4 & 5

An American in Paris
November 22 & 23

Dvořák’s Cello Concerto
February 7 & 8

Grand Canyon Suite + Rachmaninoff 2
March 14 & 15

West Side Story Symphonic Dances
+ Fanfare for the Common Man
April 11 & 12

Season Finale: Porgy and Bess
May 16 & 17

Gunter Theatre Series
Peter and the Wolf
November 1 at 3:00 pm
November 2 at 3:00 pm

Dvořák’s American String Quartet
February 14 at 7:30 pm
February 15 at 3:00 pm

The Last Five Years:
American Music Now
March 28 at 7:30 pm
March 29 at 3:00 pm

Dicey Langston:
The South Carolina Girl Who Defied an Army
April 25 at 3:00 pm
April 26 at 3:00 pm

Special Concerts
Holiday at Peace
December 12 at 7:00 pm
December 13 at 7:00 pm
December 14 at 2:00 pm
Peace Center

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire™ in Concert
January 10 at 1:00 pm and 7:00 pm
January 11 at 2:00
Peace Center

Chamber Music Series
American Echoes: from Apollo to Bluegrass
September 23 at 5:30 pm, Warehouse Theatre
September 24 at 7:00 pm, Hotel Hartness

Rhythms of the Night: A Tango Affair
February 24 at 5:30 pm, Centre Stage

Details and tickets available at greenvillesymphony.org

SC GOVERNOR'S SCHOOL FOR THE ARTS & HUMANITIES

Converse University (Moseley Chamber Music Series)

Upcountry History Museum Greenville County