“What is it about opera that keeps everybody thinking in a romantic frame of mind?” That’s a question Khori Dastoor, General Director and CEO of Houston Grand Opera (HGO), pondered while deciding the theme for HGO’s 2024-25 season.
If you take it at face value, it’s an epic tale of gods and gnomes, fighting over a gold ring that confers supreme power over the world. But there’s a more compelling way to look at The Ring of the Nibelung, Richard Wagner’s four-opera cycle.
The Houston Symphony will end its season with a splash: a two-weekend festival devoted to Richard Strauss, whose name is practically synonymous with sonic spectacle.
As the largest wildfire in Texas history raged across the Panhandle in March of this year, Loop38, the Houston-based new music ensemble, was set to begin a multi-day residency at Stephen F. Austin State University (SFA) centered on the premiere of composer Ben Morris’s multimedia work Longleaf.
The Dallas Opera will treat its audiences next season to two of opera’s all-time favorites, but the real news belongs to the season’s other two slots: They’ll hold a pair of landmark works the company has never staged.
The Houston Chamber Choir’s annual showcase of high school choirs was mere days away, and artistic director Robert Simpson was making the rounds of the featured schools to touch base.
We are back for our epic annual public chit chat, a tiny snapshot of the thousand dishy emails that fly across the inter tubes discussing what we just saw, missed, didn’t understand or flat out loved.
Nobody can say whether Camille Saint-Saëns had an extramusical topic in mind when he cast his “Organ” Symphony as a journey from storms to blazing sunshine.