When the Rolston String Quartet first flashed onto Chamber Music Houston’s radar screen, the young ensemble was quartet-in-residence at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music.
For classically-trained string players, the traditional route to making a living as a professional musician is fairly narrow: win a job in a major orchestra, find a full-time teaching position, or gig like there is no tomorrow.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
Last April, as the evening weekend revelries began at Fusebox, Austin’s annual cross-disciplinary arts festival, performer Joseph Keckler took the stage at Al Volta’s Midnight Bar.