Da Camera has flourished because of the entrepreneurial spirit and open-mindedness of its hometown of Houston, as general director Sarah Rothenberg will readily tell you.
It's the first time Matthew Dirst, Founder and Artistic Director of Houston's leading early music ensemble Ars Lyrica, has programmed an entire season of music focusing on women.
The conductor nearly chickened out. Planning the concert that will open the River Oaks Chamber Orchestra’s 2017-18 season, Vladimir Yampolsky suggested a rarity: the Symphony No. 2 by Kurt Weill of Threepenny Opera fame. Then he wavered.
In a year, a very small number of “jazz films” can or will be released — there’s just (unfortunately) not that many to be made. So, during Jazz on Film, a yearly festival curated by Peter Lucas, now in its fifth year, there are some repetitions from previous years.
For one week each June, the picturesque South Texas city of Victoria, population 65,000, rolls out its red carpet and welcomes some of the finest professional musicians from around the country to take part in the Victoria Bach Festival (VBF).
Iberian monophony, Notre Dame polyphony, Medieval mystery plays, Renaissance madrigals, Baroque operas, French virelai, Spanish villancico, Italian frottola, Scottish ballades, Sephardic love songs, and much more—early music encompasses a dazzling wealth of forms and styles.
The shift may not have been conscious, violinist Ertan Torgul says, but he sees it clearly. After 20-plus years of performing new music, San Antonio's Soli Chamber Ensemble is gravitating toward composers who bridge genres —mixing the classical tradition with jazz, rock or whatever else resonates with them. To them, music is music.
Houston Grand Opera has done it! The realization of Richard Wagner's epic Ring Cycle, the single most challenging and monumental artistic undertaking in the opera company's history, culminated with full force in the cathartic fourth and final installment Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods).
Traditional tunes, rhythms and harmonies played no role. Instead, the chamber ensemble offered up an ever-shifting soundscape of shimmers, glimmers, rustlings and wisps —Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho’s salute to the Northern Lights.
Usually, when we introduce an artist in a piece of writing, we write “singer” or “composer” and then their name, but the list of things Amina Claudine Myers does and has done is too extensive to be filed under one, two, or even three labels.