The Ivy Leaguer tore up his career plan. For his first two years at Princeton University, Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen had majored in public policy, figuring he’d go to law school and work in public affairs. Then a summer project stirred his love for singing, which went all the way back to his childhood.
If good playwrights tend to have discerning ears for the language and voices around them, then perhaps those wanting to produce a new kind of theater festival need to become the most sensitive of auditory aficionado as well. Kenn McLaughlin, artistic director of Stages Repertory Theatre in Houston, seems to subscribe to this theory because when the company began organizing their new play-reading event that would become Sin Muros: A Latina/o Theatre Festival, he knew the first act of creation was to be quiet and listen.
The numbers are in: 76 world premieres (33 for the full chamber orchestra and 43 for its flexible chamber ensembles), 36 composers commissioned—these are astounding numbers from the Houston-based River Oaks Chamber Orchestra (ROCO), now in its perpetually forward-looking 13th season.
“I was like a waiter at a wedding,” Michael Golden laughs, recounting the process of creating some seventy new collages to be exhibited at the Galveston Art Center.
In 1988, for the first time in Houston, the entire cycle of Beethoven string quartets was presented by the renowned Julliard String Quartet to launch Da Camera's inaugural season, six concerts at the one-year-old Wortham Center Cullen Theater.
Girls, and boys, may just want to have fun on New Years Eve, but for many people the celebratory countdown to some second when the Earth has managed another full orbit around the Sun without getting struck by an asteroid makes for a pretty crappy holiday.