Don’t hold your breath waiting for Houston’s River Oaks Chamber Orchestra (ROCO) to anoint a conductor as its music director. Being player-driven is in ROCO’s DNA. ...
Once Texas’ summer torpor hits, escaping the heat may be priority No. 1. If you’re looking for a reason to flee to a higher, cooler altitude, Santa Fe Opera (June 28-Aug. 24) offers a world premiere, the company’s first staging of a 20th-century classic, and new productions of two perennial favorites. ...
Thanks to his boundless optimism, the hero of Porgy and Bess is one of opera’s most lovable characters. Porgy needs all the hope he can summon, because he often contends with the weaknesses and errors of others--especially those of his beloved Bess....
Why does the Dallas Symphony mount its annual Soluna music-and-arts festival? Not because it wants to escape the proverbial same old thing. For an orchestra, “the ‘same old’ is fantastic,” president Kim Noltemy says. With Soluna, the group is thinking bigger....
He helped create an iconic group of operas, but to most of us, he exists as little more than a surname after a hyphen: Mozart-da Ponte. Yet without Lorenzo da Ponte’s librettos, we wouldn’t have Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni or Così fan tutte....
A festival celebrating arch-Romantic composer Robert Schumann. Spotlights on Richard Strauss, master of orchestral tone-painting, and today’s John Adams. A pairing of dramatic but little-known choral works by Felix Mendelssohn and Gustav Mahler....
Thanks to Welch’s love for the music, he and the company are about to unveil their first staging of the mythology-based work, which premiered in a luxe Paris Opera Ballet production in 1876. Sylvia, the tale of a shepherd’s love for a forest nymph, is the first of four full-length story ballets that Houston Ballet has in store from now through June. The coming ones include the other great beneficiary of Delibes’ gifts, Coppélia....
When Matthew Dirst was a graduate student in France, a splashy revival of a long-neglected 17th-century opera galvanized his love of baroque music. ...
Even though Katie Stahl enjoyed painting when she was growing up, she earned her college degree in psychology. Later, a friend’s suggestion led her to visit Creativity Explored, a San Francisco art center with a special mission: helping people with developmental disabilities become working artists....
