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.
In her description of her artist/partner, Megan Harrison says Jimmy James Canales is “kinda like a cat. He brings in a dead bird from the yard, and I’m like ‘I can do something with that.’”
Stanton Welch framed his new Nutcracker as a coming-of-age story, with a young Clara at the center of his dazzling holiday ballet, now entering its second year.
“This is the future of art, where would you see something like this in Houston? Someone needs to write about this,” said Abby Koenig, looking straight at me, after a stunning and mesmerizing performance of Engelbert Humperdinck's 1893 opera Hansel and Gretel, presented by Rec Room Arts at the Rec Room.