houston grand opera HGO

Mythological tales abound in Ars Lyrica Houston’s 2025-26 season, and no wonder.

“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.

Jake Heggie visited the Smithsonian Institution a few years ago for a performance of his Iconic Legacies, a song cycle evoking four U.S. first ladies.

Houston Grand Opera’s 2023-24 season is nothing short of epic. “We are producing some of the grandest and most mature artistic works in the repertoire all in one season,” says Khori Dastoor, HGO General Director and CEO. “Verdi’s last opera, Wagner’s last opera, late Mozart—these pieces are Mount Everest, each one of them.”

The Houston Symphony’s new music director, Juraj Valčuha, acknowledged that opening the season with a requiem may strike some as “a strange idea.” But Giuseppe Verdi’s Requiem is no ordinary setting of the mass for the dead.

Even after Marian Anderson won international acclaim as a singer, she felt the sting of racial discrimination. She fought back with unique weapons: her deep river of a contralto voice and her unshakably dignified bearing.

He helped create an iconic group of operas, but to most of us, he exists as little more than a surname after a hyphen: Mozart-da Ponte. Yet without Lorenzo da Ponte’s librettos, we wouldn’t have Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni or Così fan tutte.

It was a night of many firsts at Houston Grand Opera’s production of French composer Georges Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers.

“I say this with absolute ultimate pride: I introduced Christine Goerke to Dubsmash at Mai’s in Houston. It was one of my proudest moments as a friend and as a colleague,” declares Jamie Barton