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American Festival for the Arts: "World Premieres Concert" American Festival for the Arts executive and artistic director Michael Remson, orchestra conductor Clifton Evans and choral conductor Allen Hightower, along with the Houston Ballet Academy’s Chase Cobb, talk about the weekend events that will conclude AFA’s 2012 Summer Music Conservatory. That schedule of performances includes this year’s World Premieres Concert, in which young dancers from the Ballet Academy’s Summer Program execute their own original choreographies to musical scores created expressly for them by student composers from the AFA. |
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We welcome to our studios South African-born actress-singer-dancer Buyi Zama, who plays the magical medicine-monkey Rafiki in the national tour of The Lion King. The show has returned to Houston for a five-week run at the Hobby Center. |
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Houston writer Miah Arnold tells us about her new novel Sweet Land of Bigamy, which chronicles the plight of Helen Motes, a supposedly settled, middle-class woman who finds herself on a Utah mountaintop, about to get married to her second husband. |
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Soprano Stacey Weber, a native of Clear Lake, performs vocal selections by Barber, Haydn, Rachmaninov and Debussy, all of them having to do with the various times of the day. She and artistic director/pianist Keith Weber (no relation) preview Grace Song's recital program The Hours, which follows the pattern of the Christian Church’s traditional schedule of daily prayers. |
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Howard Pollack, acclaimed musical biographer and professor at UH’s Moores School of Music, discusses pioneering composers such as Charles Ives, John Alden Carpenter, Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein. That process is the topic of the illustrated lecture Made in the U-S-A, which Pollack will give at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. |
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Playwright Liz Duffy Adams and stage director Andrew Ruthven tell us about Main Street Theater’s regional-premiere production of Dog Act, Ms. Adams’s play in which Rozetta Stone, a traveling performer, and her companion “Dog” (actually a young man who is undergoing a voluntary “species demotion”), make their way across post-apocalyptic America, heading toward a gig in China … if only they can find it … that is, if it’s still there. |
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Houston Symphony: "Oz With Orchestra" Producer John Goberman chats about his “Symphonic Cinema” multimedia performance program Oz With Orchestra, in which the classic 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz is shown in a concert hall, while a full-sized orchestra accompanies the on-screen dialogue, singing and action with a live performance of the film’s original symphonic score. |
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We meet Marco Antonini, Brooklyn-based art-gallery director, who is the guest juror for this year’s "Big Show," currently on view at Lawndale Art Center. This annual celebration of Texas art invites visual artists who live within 100 miles of Houston to submit their recent work for possible inclusion. |
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Landing Theatre Company: "Smudge" Director David Rainey and actress Jennifer Gilbert tell us about the Landing Theatre Company’s production of Smudge, playwright Rachel Axler’s poignant but very dark comedy about parenthood, in which a young couple must face the fact that their reality is far different from the dreams and expectations they had for their future child. |
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Gilbert & Sullivan Society of Houston: "Iolanthe" The singers of the Gilbert and Sullivan Society of Houston make their annual live appearance on “The Front Row.” Together with their stage director, D’Oyly-Carte alumnus Alistair Donkin, and music director Brian Runnels, they perform excerpts from this year’s production, Iolanthe. |
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We speak with 29-year-old Austin-born harpist Megan Levin, the Gold Medalist in this year’s Ima Hogg Competition. She has returned to Houston this weekend to appear as guest soloist on the Dollar Concert, where she’ll reprise her contest-winning performance of the Harp Concerto by Argentinean composer Alberto Ginastera. |
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At the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, we look at the work of artists Julia Barello and Beverly Penn. Both of them create installations that evoke the plant world: Penn by making bronze castings of real flowers, leaves, stems, branches and seed-pods; Barello by cutting plant-parts out of sheets of exposed x-ray, MRI, and other types of medical-imaging film. |
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American Festival for the Arts: "Collaborations" American Festival for the Arts faculty artists Richard Nunemaker and Rodolfo Morales play Lines, a 1997 work for clarinet and piano by Turkish-American composer Kamran Ince. Their performance, together with our conversation with AFA director Michael Remson, and video artists Mary Magsamen and Stephan Hillerbrand, introduces the AFA’s 2012 “Collaborations” multi-disciplinary concert. |
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This year’s “Summer Chills” attraction at the Alley Theatre is Agatha Christie’s Black Coffee. We chat with the Alley’s artistic director Gregory Boyd, who staged the piece, and resident company member James Black, who takes another fine turn in this production as Christie’s master detective Hercule Poirot. |
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Gallerist Steven Hempel shows us Shifting and Transforming Ideas, Shapes and Materials, an exhibition of small sculptural works by six local and national artists, currently on view at Peel Gallery. |
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Texas composers, performers and music-producers Deborah Anderson and Richard DeRosa share tracks from their new CD Sonnet Love Songs, an album of soft-jazz-, classical and pop-inspired settings of romantic poems by Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and others. |
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FrenetiCore’s Rebecca French and Robert Thoth chat about Memoriam, their new dance-theater piece about a young woman trapped within a set of traumatic memories that she seems doomed to repeat. Described as heartbreaking, wry and brutal, the production opens Friday night at the Frenetic Theatre. |
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Charles Olivieri-Munroe & James Dick The International Music Festival Institute's founder and director James Dick, and visiting conductor Charles Olivieri-Munroe, talk with us about Saturday night's concluding concert by the Texas Festival Orchestra. Dick is the piano soloist on that program, and Maestro Olivieri-Munroe conducts works by Shostakovich, Khachaturian, and Dvorak. |
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We groove to rockin’ sounds from five decades ago as actor-singers from the Texas Repertory Theatre Company perform numbers from Beehive: The '60s Musical, a high-energy, nostalgic look back at the greatest girl-group hits of that decade, performed by women with big voices and big hair! |
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Assistant curator Joshua Fischer introduces us to the current show Reverse of Volume RG at Rice Gallery. For this installation, the contemporary Japanese artist Yasuaki Onishi has taken the simplest materials – plastic sheeting and black hot glue – to create a mountainous form that appears to float in space, like a reverse-sculpture made of air. |
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Cast members Regina Hearne and Candice D’Meza, and musical director Carlton Leake, perform songs from Sanctified, the gospel musical that is wrapping up The Ensemble Theatre’s performance season with a song and a shout. |
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Writer Eleazar Catter talks his play The Poets, which tackles the issues of bullying and teen suicide and how one young poet deals with his situation. The drama is in its final weekend of performances at the Frenetic Theater. |
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"The Legend of Zelda: Symphony of the Goddesses" We preview the multimedia concert The Legend of Zelda: Symphony of the Goddesses with the show’s executive producer Jason Michael Paul, music director and arranger Chad Seiter and producer and lead creative Jeron Moore. Based on music and visuals from the popular video-game series, the program features larger-than-life game-video projected on a huge screen hanging above the stage, and music from the Zelda scores, performed live by the Houston Symphony. |
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Director Jim Tommaney's Edge Theatre is currently presenting its new production of Edward Albee’s very first play and initial theatrical success, The Zoo Story. The one-act drama chronicles the chance meeting in a park between a stable-if-vaguely-dissatisfied publishing company executive (Andrew Adams) and an alienated and troubled younger man (Travis Ammons), whose aggressive attempts to initiate some sort of meaningful interaction with the older gentleman lead to a shocking and violent climax. |
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Stage-director Matt Huff and cast members Lyndsay Sweeney and Crystal O’Brien from the Mildred’s Umbrella Theater Company discuss their regional premiere production of Large Animal Games. The play, by Steve Yockey, is described as a “tale of sex, love, and self-delusion about the overlapping escapades of a group of friends who should be old enough to know better about matters of the heart … but still manage to mess things up, anyway.” |
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Saxophonist Kirk Whalum, a former Houstonian, has made quite a name for himself the past few years in smooth-jazz and soul-music circles. But he’s gone full-frontal with his latest project. Kirk and his brother, singer Kevin Whalum, have recreated the album of vocal standards, Romance Language, which iconic jazz saxophonist John Coltrane and singer Johnny Hartman put out back in 1963. The Whalum Brothers, together with another accomplished contemporary jazz vocalist, Nicole Henry, are touring on behalf of their new version of the Romance Language collection. |
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We preview the festivities that are taking place at the Bayou Bend Collection and Gardens with studio performances by the two musical ensembles set to perform at today’s Fourth of July Celebration at the former home of Miss Ima Hogg. Vocalist Danielle Reich and her band take us further into the realm of what is perhaps our nation’s most significant contribution to world culture: jazz. |
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We preview the festivities taking place at the Bayou Bend Collection and Gardens with studio performances by the two musical ensembles set to perform at today’s Fourth of July Celebration at the former home of Miss Ima Hogg. The Paragon Brass Ensemble treats us to standards from the Great American Songbook, including tunes by George Gershwin, Irving Berlin and Duke Ellington |
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Public Poetry: Stephen Gros & Jonathan Moody Texas poets Jonathan Moody and Stephen Gros share some of their latest work with us. They are two of the guests-of-honor at this month’s Public Poetry Reading, taking place at the Houston Public Library’s McGovern-Stella Link Neighborhood Branch. |
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We chat with Perry So, associate conductor of the Hong Kong Philharmonic. He’s come to Texas to lead an orchestral concert at the Round Top Music Festival. Maestro So previews his program of Beethoven, Mahler and Richard Strauss. |
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We feature the Houston jazz collective Free Radicals, nine-time winner in the “Best Jazz” category of the Houston Press Music Awards. Through multi-lingual songs drawing from funk, jazz, Afro-beat, Latin and other global musical traditions and influences, the album explores the various types of walls that power-wielders put up in order to oppress the people. Band members Nick Cooper and Theo Bijarro chat with us and share tracks from the band's new album The Freedom Fence. |
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17th Annual American Festival for the Arts Executive and artistic director Michael Remson talks about what’s going on at this year’s American Festival for the Arts, Houston’s summer conservatory for gifted young musicians. And we speak with Joan Landry, Associate Conductor of the Cape Cod Symphony, who will lead AFA’s first orchestral concert of the season. Plus, AFA faculty-pianists Rodolfo Morales and Shawn Heller perform for us. |
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We have a studio performance by a former Houstonian: jazz singer, Kellye Gray. She’s back in town for a musical reunion with two of her long-time Bayou City colleagues, pianist Pamela York and bassist David Craig … and they give us some samples of the cool sounds they’ll be purveying at the Cézanne jazz club in Montrose. |
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Lone Star Lyric Theater: "Follies" Artistic director Kelli Estes, music director Jeremy Wood, and singers from the Lone Star Lyric Theater Festival treat us to songs from the LSL Follies, the grand finale of this year’s Lone Star Festival. It’s filled with show-stopping numbers from favorite Broadway musicals, and it takes place at the Ovations Night Club in Rice Village. |
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Marc Dolan, professor at the City University of New York, talks about “The Bard of New Jersey’s South Shore,” Bruce Springsteen, subject of Dolan’s just-published -- and many are saying, “definitive” biography of the Boss and his music -- Bruce Springsteen and the Promise of Rock ‘n’ Roll. Dolan shares selected passages from his book during the Poison Pen Reading Series at Poison Girl Bar. |
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Texas Music Festival: Josep Caballe-Domenech & Dan Zhu Spanish conductor Josep Caballé-Domenech and violinist Dan Zhu, an alumnus of the Texas Music Festival summer training institute, preview the last of this year’s concerts by the TMF Orchestra. The program includes three colorful symphonic scores from the early-to-mid 20th Century. |
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Directors Frédérique Added, William Lewis and David Brown, plus soloists from their Franco-American Vocal Arts Academy, perform excerpts from Jacques Offenbach’s operetta La Périchole. The Texas-based company presents this rarely-staged musical delight at Miller Outdoor Theatre. |
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Bestselling adventure novelist James Rollins talks about some of the intricacies of plot and characterization included in his newest thriller Bloodline, in which the heroes of the covert anti-terrorism unit Sigma Force are up against the ruthless, family-connected thugs of the Guild, a shadowy international criminal organization that is the modern-day incarnation of the ancient military order, the Knights Templar of the 12th Century. |
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Nonfiction writer David MacLean, a graduate of the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program, reads a passage from his memoir The Answer To The Riddle Is Me, scheduled for publication next year. MacLean is one of the writers who will share samples of their latest work during the "Poison Pen" literary reading at Poison Girl Bar. |
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Michael Stern, music director of the Kansas City Symphony, talks about the all-American orchestral concert he’ll conduct this Saturday at the International Festival-Institute at Round Top. |
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"Contemporary Asian Art: Texas Connections" Curator Kimberley Davenport shows us around one of the Asia Society Texas Center’s inaugural art exhibitions, this one featuring work by contemporary Asian and Asian-American artists who have either lived in Texas or whose work is held in public or private collections in the Lone Star State. |
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We hear about BooTown Theatre Company’s world-premiere production of River Bottom Rules. Puppeteer Camella Clements and BooTown’s associate artistic director Lindsay Burleson, who conceived and directed the show, chat about using shadow-puppets, video and photography to tell a story about a little girl growing up in the small, off-kilter, East Texas town of Highlands. |
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Houston Young Artists Concerts 11-year-old pianist Lauren Yang, 16-year-old violinist Melissa Du and 17-year-old cellist Andrew Shiau perform for us. They are student affiliates of the Houston Young Artist’s Concerts, a showcase for musically-gifted youngsters from Houston and surrounding areas, and they preview HYAC’s Summer Outreach Concert. |
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Texas Music Festival: "Perspectives" Series Seven of the Texas Music Festival’s distinguished faculty-artists perform movements from Beethoven’s Septet for Winds and Strings. |
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Ceramicist Piero Fenci, this year’s Texas Master Artist at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, shows us around Battlement, the HCCC’s exhibition of body armor, vessels and defensive weapons that he has made out of the relatively fragile medium of fired clay. |
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Summer Symphony Nights: Ward Stare & WeiChen Lin Ward Stare, the resident conductor of the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra, talks about the works by Brahms and Mendelssohn that he’ll lead on the fourth of this year’s Houston Symphony “Summer Symphony Nights” concerts at Miller Outdoor Theatre. And we meet WeiChen Lin, the young Taiwanese percussionist who was the Silver Medalist in the 2012 Houston Symphony Ima Hogg Young Artist Competition. At the Miller Theatre concert, Lin will reprise the performance of Alan Hovhaness’s Fantasy on Japanese Woodprints for Marimba and Orchestra that earned him his competition victory earlier this month. |
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Summer Symphony Nights: Jose Luis Gomez The young Venezuelan-born maestro José Luis Gómez talks about the program of crowd-pleasers by Rossini, Bizet, Haydn and Stravinsky that he’s put together for a “Summer Symphony Nights” concert at Miller Outdoor Theatre. |
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Texas Music Festival: Lavard Skou-Larsen & Xiao Wang Brazilian conductor Lavard Skou-Larsen tells us about the works by Richard Strauss and Johannes Brahms that he’ll direct with the Texas Music Festival Orchestra this weekend at The Woodlands Pavilion and at the University of Houston, and we meet Chinese violinist, Xiao Wang, who plays the Sibelius Violin Concerto on those same concerts, as a result of his winning the TMF’s 2012 Cynthia Woods Mitchell Young Artist Competition. |
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We have a preview of the Houston Ebony Music Society’s 2012 Juneteenth Summer Concert Stirring the Soul. Composer-arranger John Cornelius, musicologist Carrie Allen Tipton, and program director Jason Oby join four of the Ebony Opera Guild singers in the Geary Performance Studio for an exploration of the musical tradition of the African-American male vocal quartet. |
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Artistic director Kelli Estes, music director Paul Johnson, and five more of the actor-singers from the Lone Star Lyric Theater Festival perform for us. They preview their upcoming production of the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical On the Twentieth Century, about an actor chasing a director, who’s chasing a Hollywood star, while everybody’s chasing after the money. |
