ROCO’s Virtual Cycle of Access to Music

If you jotted down a list of snappy names, you probably wouldn’t include this: ROCO, Houston’s Chamber Orchestra. But that is the group’s new moniker, and founder Alecia Lawyer makes a point of it as she looks toward the coming season. The 21-year-old ensemble will continue to branch out from its original home, the Church of St. John the Divine, into venues across Houston.

“We are on a journey, and we’ve been on a journey for a long time,” Lawyer says. “I just love taking people on a tour of their city through music. My favorite question at the beginning of concerts is, ‘How many people are new to ROCO? Raise your hand. How many people are new to this venue?’ Usually, a third of the audience is new to ROCO, and a third is new to the venue. It’s awesome, and it could not be more of what I call a virtuous cycle of access.”

Access is a byword for a group that livestreams its concerts free of charge and keeps hundreds of videos online for viewing on demand—also free. Beyond setting their sights on ever more in-person listeners, ROCO and Lawyer have a fresh reason for exploring new concert locations: The Church of St. John the Divine expects to begin a big construction project late this year, uprooting a chunk of its campus. Even though the sanctuary will stay open, ROCO aims to stay out of the way.

So it will play one of next season’s four main-series programs in the Hobby Center for the Performing Arts’ Zilkha Hall—marking ROCO’s first-ever performance in a conventional downtown venue (Feb. 13). The orchestra will take another program (Nov. 14-15) to the new Ismaili Center on Allen Parkway.

“I love their mission of inclusion of the community,” Lawyer says. “And the space that they have is so gorgeous,_, with (the building’s) geometric patterns.”

Showing audiences that new music can be engaging and mind-opening has always been another of ROCO’s missions, and the coming season will continue the crusade. The group will premiere seven commissioned works, including two by its new composer in residence, Jessica Meyer. ROCO listeners may well remember the group’s 2025 performance of Meyer’s Go Big or Go Home, which weaves a rock band into the orchestra.

“It is genius,” Lawyer declares. “It is not us as an orchestra playing AC/DC—I love AC/DC—and it’s not a rock band playing Bach. …It’s a three-and-a-half minute tour de force of creative use of this instrumentation.” A key part of Meyer’s creativity, Lawyer adds, springs from her being a performer—a violist—as well as a composer.

“That is I think what’s so great about most composers nowadays,” continues Lawyer, who also is ROCO’s artistic director and oboist. “They are not isolated or siloed into being in a room (alone), writing music. They are also out there performing and receiving the immediate feedback of the audiences. That’s what I love so much.” Meyer is creating a work for the full ensemble (Nov. 14-15) and a chamber piece featuring bassoonist Kristin Wolfe Jensen (April 3).

Another new work will come from Leanna Primiani, whose Neither men nor money validate my worth—honoring survivors of human trafficking—premiered during ROCO’s 2021-22 season. Primiani’s Visions (Sept. 25-26) will examine “the lenses we look through,” Lawyer says, ranging from the Hubble Space Telescope to eyeglasses given to children who need them. But Lawyer cheerfully adds that she doesn’t know the topic or style of every new work that’s coming

“I kind of don’t want to know,” she says, then doubles down:  “I kind of love the fact that I don’t know.” All the composers ROCO commissions write “evocative” music, Lawyer explains, and she rarely feels a need to dictate what they should create. “What’s exciting is finding these people and then saying, ‘Well, I’m fine for you to go on a whole different exploration.’”

The season will also include a scattering of orchestral classics, such as Beethoven’s Symphony No. 2 (Nov. 14-15). But Lawyer, not surprisingly, has her own perspective on what qualifies as a classic.

She points to Anthony DiLorenzo’s Lewis Carroll fantasy Jabberwocky, which ROCO premiered in 2014, recorded in 2017 and will bring back next spring (May 1). To Lawyer, “it’s so familiar, and one of my top five new works we’ve ever played, (so) I feel like it’s a classic. … Yes, we’ll recognize the long-dead people. But we have living people who have been with us a long time, too.”

Besides bringing back such familiar collaborators as conductors Delyana Lazarova (Sept. 25-26) and Mei-Ann Chen (Feb. 13), ROCO will welcome first-time guests. Conductor Jorge Parodi, music director of the University of Houston’s Moores Opera Center, will lead a tango program at ARTECHOUSE in the Heights, where dancers and immersive video will transport the audience to the Latin world (Jan. 22). The season finale will introduce ROCO’s audience to conductor Kensho Watanabe, whose credits include New York’s Metropolitan Opera (May 1).

Watanabe led Houston Grand Opera’s performances of Kevin Puts’ Silent NIght last winter, but Lawyer met him several years ago at a festival where she was playing the oboe. She salutes him as “a fabulous collaborator and an artist who enhances and ignites (rather than) dictates.” She puts that more pointedly. ”This is probably the biggest compliment I can give a conductor ever, and you can start the article with this: He does not get in our way!”

—STEVEN BROWN