The Wilmington Symphony will premiere 'The Dance of the Coin' Feb. 3 at the CFCC Wilson Center.
Handling coins is still a regular occurrence for many people. Writing this story served as a reminder that touching these artfully cast pieces of metal is as close as most of us ever come to touching history.
What’s more, when we take a moment to look, we may discover a profoundly unexpected window into a different time and place that fires the imagination.
On the next Wilmington Symphony Orchestra concert, one such encounter will light up Cape Fear Community College's Wilson Center stage with the sights and sounds of a particular time and place in “The Dance of the Coin," a new work by Wilmington pianist and composer Julia Walker Jewell. The concert, which is Saturday, Feb. 3, will also include the winners of the Richard R. Deas Young Artists Concerto Competition in music by Karel Husa and Max Bruch, as well as orchestral music from Alexander Borodin’s opera “Prince Igor,” including the popular "Polovtsian Dances.”
On a visit last week to the Jewell family business -- a music venue, sundry and canoe rental shop at the foot of Castle Street known as Ted’s Fun on the River -- Julia took a moment from practice at the piano to talk about “The Dance of the Coin.” She said the work, seven years in the making, had its genesis with the mysterious appearance in her wallet of a 1942 German coin she found when paying for a cup of coffee.
“I don't know how it got there. I have no idea. It had a swastika on it. And I mean, I was just frozen,” Jewell said, still amazed when thinking of that moment.
The work started. She began reading extensively -- poetry from Holocaust victims, and accounts of the wives of German officers and officials implementing Hitler’s “final solution.”
”I created a few little scenarios of what it may have been like," Jewell said. "I did a ton of reading on life as a Jewish person in Germany.”
Once she started, first with a piece for solo piano, the work, she said, flowed out of her.
What the audience will see and hear Saturday night evolved from a piano solo into a fully integrated work merging music with choreography and film. Wilmington Symphony music director Steven Errante orchestrated Jewell’s piece, giving it the feeling of a piano concerto.
The work expanded further when choreographer Lisa Broadhead read about Jewell’s encounter with the coin and the music that came out of it, but the idea of the story being on stage and on screen came to Jewell very early on.
“From the beginning, I thought, ‘I can really see a film with this,’" Jewell said. "So I wrote the screenplay.”
Broadhead knew someone from Wilmington-based Honey Head Films who became interested in the project, and a team of women working together helped fulfill Jewell’s vision for the work.
Jewell has composed in nearly every musical genre, and she’s clear that “Dance of the Coin” is rooted in the classical tradition.
“It's a very danceable waltz for the most part,” she said. “The main theme is a grand waltz theme, and in my mind, that theme represents hope. And no matter what else happens, that theme of hope comes back."
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