Steven Brown

The Houston Symphony’s new music director, Juraj Valčuha, acknowledged that opening the season with a requiem may strike some as “a strange idea.” But Giuseppe Verdi’s Requiem is no ordinary setting of the mass for the dead.

When the Apollo Chamber Players made its debut, grand visions of the future had nothing to do with it. The quartet, violinist Matthew Detrick recalls, had one simple goal: “to do that first concert.”

Ars Lyrica is picking up right where it left off. After closing last season with the poignant finish of Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, Houston’s baroque ensemble will launch its 2022-23 season with another helping of the melancholy, gently dissonant harmony that bears Purcell’s trademark.

As he planned out the Houston Chamber Choir’s season, artistic director Robert Simpson figured on two must-haves: a return visit by guest conductor María Guinand, the Venezuelan he calls “a joy generator”; and a performance of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s All-Night Vigil, the soulful a cappella work the choir was rehearsing when the covid-19 shutdown silenced it in March 2020.

When the pandemic forced Ars Lyrica to cancel plans last season for its second opera staging, the group didn’t take it lying down.