Cultural Warrior: ROCO’s Alecia Lawyer
Alecia L. Lawyer is the founder, executive and artistic director, and principal oboist of the River Oaks Chamber Orchestra (ROCO). With a tag line of “the Most Fun You Can Have with Serious Music,” Lawyer takes to heart the job of making classical music welcoming to all [...]
Fresh Tracks
Three Houston Music Groups Offer New Recordings In the 21st Century you really can find everything on the internet. Thanks to the magic of digital technology, you can find a car, a house or, if you are the Houston Chamber Choir’s artistic director, Robert Simpson, the manuscript [...]
Last Notes
Tokyo String Quartet’s Final Houston Visit “It’s something like a love affair between the Tokyo String Quartet and the Houston Friends of Chamber Music,” says violinist Kikuei Ikeda. First invited to perform in Houston just seven years after they officially formed at the Julliard School in 1969 [...]
Cultural Warrior: Sandra Bernhard
Sandra Bernhard is the engine behind such ground-breaking HGOco/Houston Grand Opera programs such as Song of Houston and Home and Place. She also is the lead on numerous other projects that bring HGO into Houston’s multi-cultural communities in a way that sets the standard for [...]
Local Lights
Three Houston Artists Put Houston on the Map None of them are from Texas, but as the saying goes, “they got here as fast as they could”. Once they arrived in the Bayou City, they found a thriving arts community. “People in Houston have an ownership of their arts organizations [...]
Shifting Keys
A Classical DJ Goes Undercover The line at the East Gate of the Free Press Summer Fest 2012 (FPSF) is deceptively small as I arrive just in time to get my press credentials. I quickly pass through the entrance and make my way towards the main stage and immediately realize why the line is so [...]
Review: The Bad Plus On Sacred Ground
May 5, 2012 Da Camera The Bad Plus’s interpretation of Stravinsky’s, The Rite of Spring, presented by Da Camera of Houston, begins with a hazy, ambient prerecorded auditory collage accompanied by foggy visual projections. It’s the typical postmodern art rock concert opening [...]
Build it and they will come
Texas Music Festival sets the standard for excellence Never underestimate the power of a cowboy conductor. That very image served as the poster for the first Immanuel and Helen Olshan Texas Music Festival (TMF), now in its 22nd year. “Actually, that poster is kind of iconic [...]
“Welcome na de Shrine”
Fela comes to Houston Prepare to gyrate. The Afrobeat is heading to Houston. Fela, the Tony-Award winning Broadway sensation based on the larger-than-life Nigerian musician and activist Fela Anikulapo Kuti, comes to the Society for the Performing Arts stage on June 5-10. “Music is the weapon” proved the motto for Fela’s life and work. He [...]
Review: The Rumi Concert
The Rumi-atics came out in full force to the Brown Foundation Performing Arts Theater at the Asia Society Texas Center on May 22 to see the great sage and Rumi translator and scholar Coleman Barks. If anyone can bring the 13th [...]
Review: Don Carlos
What does a choir of red crosses, pyrotechnics, and a wooden cart carrying chained heretics make? In Houston Grand Opera’s version of Giuseppe Verdi’s Don Carlos, it’s the turning point from a mediocre opera to a memorable one. Don [...]
Review: Houston Grand Opera’s Mary Stuart
The tragedy of Geatano Donizetti’s Mary Stuart, which had its Houston Grand Opera premiere last month, is that there’s so much drama, intrigue and passion in the real story behind rival queens Elizabeth I of England and Mary, Queen of Scots [...]
