|
Oklahoma singer-songwriter K. C. Clifford and her husband, guitarist David Broyles, join us for a live studio session. The duo are on their way to the Kerrville Folk Festival, but first they make a stop in Houston to celebrate their new album The Tag Hollow Sessions with a show and CD-release party at The Mucky Duck. |
|
Houston Spanish and Flamenco Festival (with video) Singer Irma La Paloma, guitarist Jeremy Garcia and percussionist Chris Howard bring their trademark passion and energy to the Geary Studio to give us a taste of what’s coming up on the 2nd Annual Houston Spanish and Flamenco Festival, which takes place at San Jacinto College South. |
|
Poet and interpreter Coleman Barks discusses the literary legacy of the 13th-century Persian mystic Rumi, some of whose verses Barks will perform, along with cellist David Darling, percussionist Glen Velez, and story-dancer Zuleikha, at the new Asia Society Texas Center. |
|
Visual artist William Betts shows us the images he’s created from pictures taken by surveillance cameras mounted in various public places. These voyeuristic pieces, which add another dimension to the debate over personal privacy rights versus the need for the government to provide security, are included in the exhibition Recognition, on view at McClain Gallery. |
|
Moores School of Music faculty artist and keyboard virtuoso Matthew Dirst – who’s usually identified as an early-music specialist – tells us about the recital of pieces from the mid-20th century that he’ll perform on the new Pasi Pipe Organ at downtown’s Co-Cathedral of the Sacred Heart. |
|
We chat with actress, author and screenwriter Carrie Fisher, creator of the Princess Leia character in the original Star Wars movies. Fisher is currently telling stories about herself and members of her extended family in her one-woman show Wishful Drinking, at the Hobby Center as part of this year’s Gexa Energy Broadway Series. |
|
Artistic director Eileen J. Morris and two members of her cast (Ben Cain and Wilbert Williams) discuss The Ensemble Theatre’s new production of King Hedley II, the next-to-last of the 10 plays by Pulitzer Prize-winning African-American playwright August Wilson, that are set in the Hill District of Pittsburgh. |
|
We preview a rare performance, taking place here in Houston, of the Sacred Service by 20th-century Swiss-American composer Ernest Bloch. The composer’s grandson, Ernie Bloch, joins us in the studio, along with Grammy-winning baritone Mark S. Doss, and Phillip Kloeckner, artistic director of the Houston-based United Nations Association International Choir. They talk about and share excerpts from Mister Bloch’s choral-and-orchestral masterpiece, written on the brink of WWII. |
|
Three of the semi-finalists in this year’s Lois Alba Aria Competition demonstrate the musical skills that will be judged when they and the other contenders vie for honors in the competition’s final two elimination rounds at the University of Saint Thomas. Lois Alba herself joins us in the studio as well. |
|
Fayetteville Chamber Music Festival (includes more video!) We have a live performance by artistic director and clarinetist Håkan Rosengren and three more of the world-class musicians who are participating in this year’s Fayetteville Chamber Music Festival. They sample the repertoire of small-ensemble gems by 18th, 19th and 20th-century European composers that they’ll be playing on the concluding weekend of the festival. |
|
We chat with jazz-fusion composer and keyboard-player Jeff Lorber. He has put together a 21st-century version of his pioneeirng group The Jeff Lorber Fusion, and they play the Red Cat Jazz Café in downtown Houston. |
|
Playwright Douglas Anderson and actor Kevin Dean talk about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian who was involved with the resistance movement in WWII-era Germany that was actively working to bring down Adolf Hitler and his Nazi regime. Dean portrays Bonhoeffer in Mister Anderson’s biographical play, The Beams Are Creaking, currently being presented by Houston’s A. D. Players. |
|
Acclaimed New York choreographer Jonah Bokaer previews his site-specific piece On Vanishing, which his dancers will present at the new Asia Society Texas Center in the Museum District. |
|
Music director Hans Graf shares his thoughts about Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto and Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, the two 20th-century masterpieces that will be featured on the Houston Symphony’s final Classical-Series Concerts of the Season. |
|
Singers from Bayou City Concert Musicals serenade us with both familiar and forgotten songs by Sigmund Romberg, as they sample the repertoire from their Cabaret Series show One Kiss, which they’re presenting at The Ensemble Theatre. |
|
At the Menil Collection, California visual artist Richard Serra shows us around the first critical overview of his drawings ever assembled. The innovative techniques, unusual media and dimensions of scale that he has employed in his work over the past 40 years have expanded the definition and forever altered the practice of the art of drawing. |
|
Playwright Randy Baker and director Timothy Dickson tell us about the Wordsmyth Theater Company’s staged reading of Baker’s play Forgotten Kingdoms, which asks such questions as: Whose beliefs are the strongest when tragedy threatens everyone’s future? And what happens in such a situation when faith isn’t enough? |
|
Jazz singer Cindy Scott and guitarist Brian Seeger join us in the Geary Performance Studio for a little sample of the swinging sounds they’ll be performing during a special Music for Mothers’ Day Service at the Unitarian-Universalist Fellowship of Houston. |
|
Artistic director Michael Zuraw and composer Thomas Osborne talk about the new piece by Osborne that the Aperio: Music of the Americas chamber-music series will premiere this weekend. Dreams of Sky and Sea is a set of songs based on texts by Twentieth-Century Korean poet, Kim Sowol. We hear performances of earlier similar works by Thomas Osborne as we preview Aperio’s final concert of the season, Awakenings: Contemporary Expressions of Spirit and Nature. |
|
Saxophonist Woody Witt performs for us, previewing Cracked Across The Brow, a concert of new music for saxophone, computers and electronics, which he'll present at the University of Saint Thomas in collaboration with composers Kevin Patton, Chapman Welch and Joe LoCascio. |
|
Renowned New York printmaker Dennis McNett talks about constructing a rolling Mayan temple (a nod to "2012 Apocalypse" hype), his first mechanically-powered sculpture-on-wheels commissioned specifically for Houston’s Art Car Parade. |
|
Choreographer Lydia Hance, composer Charles Halka and photographer Lorie Garcia describe the multi-sensory evening of live dance, music, photography and film they have put together for a program entitled Context, to be presented by Ms. Hance’s Frame Dance Productions at the Winter Street Studios. |
|
Music Doing Good has gathered together “Three Generations of Houston’s Best Jazz Musicians” for a concert at Zilkha Hall. We talk with one of the senior members of the group: Bayou City native son, pianist Joe Sample, co-founder of the legendary Jazz Crusaders. |
|
The entire cast – all three players (Tom Long, Rob de los Reyes and Joshua Estrada) – discuss the Texas Repertory Theatre’s new production of Yasmina Reza’s most popular comedy, ART. It’s the story of three guys whose long-term mutual friendship is shaken to its core when one of them spends a fortune on an all-white painting. |
|
Fayetteville Chamber Music Festival (includes video) Texas artists Håkan Rosengren (clarinet) and Rick Rowley (piano), and violinist Amy Schwartz Moretti from Mercer University in Georgia, perform duos by Bohuslav Martinu and turn-of-the-20th-Century Swedish composer Laura Netzel. They’re here to preview the first weekend of the Sixth Annual Fayetteville Chamber Music Festival, which gets underway Friday evening with an all-Czech program. |
|
From The Top, NPR’s showcase for the country’s best young classical musicians, comes to the Wortham Center for a live taping. And we have a studio performance by pianist Esther Liao and cellist Charles Seo, the two Houston-area teenagers who have been selected to appear as guests on the nationally-syndicated program. Plus, we chat with Michael Webster, Music Director of the Houston Youth Symphony, which will also take the stage with FTP host Christopher O’Riley. Esther Liao, Charles Seo and Michael Webster talk with St.John Flynn. |
|
"First We'll Have an Orgy, Then We'll Go See Tony Bennett" Best-selling author Sam Wasson talks about legendary film director Paul Mazursky, best known for Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, his 1969 Oscar-nominated comedy about free love. Sam Wasson shares stories from his latest book, Paul on Mazursky at this month’s “Artful Thursday” program at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. |
|
Music director Hans Graf talks about the Totally Mozart Houston Symphony concerts, featuring the composer’s "Paris" and "Prague" symphonies. The program also showcases the orchestra’s principal bassoonist Rian Craypo and internationally-renowned Russian soprano Albina Shagimuratova, who performs two of Mozart’s virtuoso concert arias. |
|
Artistic director Antoine Plante previews his Mercury orchestra’s season-finale concert Heroic Beethoven, which includes the composer’s Second and Third Symphonies. Maestro Plante chats about, and shares musical excerpts from that program, performed on period instruments for the first time in Houston. |
|
Visual artist Mike Beradino shows us around his Art Palace exhibition Freq Out, which utilizes both new and antiquated technologies in an attempt to construct meaning from the contemporary digital devices that surround, mediate, and perhaps even dominate, our daily lives. |
|
Houston Ballet artistic director Stanton Welch and soloist Nao Kusuzaki chat about the company’s Miller Outdoor Theater production of Giselle. That classic ghost-story ballet will be paired on a program with the famous pas-de-deuxs from Swan Lake and Le Corsaire. |
|
We welcome to the George Geary Studio members of the Austin band Bee Vs. Moth. They perform excerpts from the original score they’ve created for the 1919 silent movie The Oyster Princess, a romantic comedy by the legendary director, Ernst Lubitsch. It’s one of the pictures that helped define the sophisticated style of film-making that was his trademark and which later came to be known as “The Lubitsch Touch.” Bee Vs. Moth performs their complete musical soundtrack live, accompanying Houston Public Media’s screening of The Oyster Princess at Discovery Green. |
|
"Classical Minds" (includes video) We hear music for classical guitar, played by Valerie Hartzell, Eric Gracia and Andrea Cannon, directors of the “Classical Minds” Guitar Institute and Competition, which is offered every summer as a part of the annual Texas Music Festival at the University of Houston. Our three guest-artists will preview the concert they’re going to present at a benefit for this year’s Guitar Festival and its Competition Prize Fund. |
|
Clarinetist Richie Hawley and pianist Timothy Hester perform Debussy’s First Rhapsody, previewing Da Camera of Houston’s season-finale concert Rites of Spring, to be presented at the Wortham Center. The program’s overall title is borrowed from Igor Stravinsky’s revolutionary and iconic dance score, which will be performed as a trio for piano, bass and drums by the widely-hailed New York jazz ensemble The Bad Plus. That group’s bassist, Reid Anderson, also joins us to talk about the band’s interpretation of Stravinsky’s ground-breaking work that is still shocking, a century after its premiere. |
|
Houston poets John Pluecker and Robin Reagler talk about their unique approaches to their craft and share a sample of their recent work with us. They are two of the featured writers on this month’s Public Poetry Reading, taking place at the Jungman Neighborhood Branch of the Houston Public Library. |
|
"French Toast: Chansons and Champagne" Artistic director Kevin Riehle and pianist Keith Weber chat about Cantare Houston’s season-finale, French Toast: Chansons and Champagne, at First Congregational Church. It’s an evening of sparkling French choral music and art song, featuring Grammy-nominated mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton. |
|
Baritone Brian Shircliffe performs for us. He, along with Justin Smith and Rob Seible, artistic directors of the Houston Cecilia Chamber Choir and VOX, talk about their concert performances of Leonard Bernstein’s Mass at Saint Phillip Presbyterian Church. This will mark the first time, ever, that the 1971 work has been performed in its entirety in Houston |
|
Choreographer Dominic Walsh previews A Decade of Dance, the program that caps off his Dominic Walsh Dance Theater’s Tenth Anniversary Season. The mixed-repertory evening of dance includes a world première by Walsh, inspired by the life of French artist Camille Claudel. |
|
Violin virtuoso Rachel Barton Pine talks about both the “high-art” sonatas and the get-down-and-dance folk-fiddling that she and her period-instruments ensemble Trio Settecento will perform on their concert of baroque music from Scotland. Houston Early Music presents that recital, entitled The Scottish Play. |
|
Guy Roberts, director of the Prague Shakespeare Festival, and Rebecca Greene Udden, artistic director of Houston’s Main Street Theater, chat about their companies’ co-production of Shakespeare’s historical drama Richard III, which features Roberts both directing and starring in the title role. |
|
Chavdar Parashkevov and Natasha Kislenko Bayou City-based Bulgarian violinist Chavdar Parashkevov and Russian pianist Natasha Kislenko perform for us. The duo is in the midst of an international tour celebrating the release of their brand-new CD of Russian sonatas and showpieces, and they perform their recital this evening at the University of Saint Thomas. |
|
Music director Hans Graf previews the Houston Symphony’s all-Shostakovich program, which features the composer’s Symphony Number Eleven. The orchestra performs that concert at Jones Hall, then travels to New York City to play the same program at Carnegie Hall. |
|
Co-artistic directors Sophia Torres and Sonia Noriega describe some of the mini-treats for the eyes and ears that they’ll unwrap during Psophonia Dance Company’s Spring show Delicious, to be presented at the Barnevelder Movement/Arts Complex. |
|
Resident actors James Black and John Tyson describe the down-and-out, middle-aged Irish brothers they portray in the Alley Theatre’s production of Conor McPherson’s comedy-drama The Seafarer. |
|
Playwright Caridad Svich and Houston stage-director Rob Kimbro talk about Ms. Svich’s play The Way of Water, written in response to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Theater companies across the country are presenting staged readings of the drama, marking the second anniversary of the nation’s worst environmental disaster in history. The local reading takes place at Main Street Theater’s Chelsea Market playhouse. |
|
Libi Lebel, music director of the Texas Medical Center Orchestra, and Thomas Jaber, artistic director of the Houston Masterworks Chorus, tell us about the performance of Johannes Brahms’ German Requiem, which their two ensembles will give at Jones Hall. |
|
Pianist Rene Casarsa and his Tango Quartet, including bandoneón player Pablo Fernandez, perform for us, giving us a taste of their Center-Stage performances at the Houston International Festival’s “Spotlight on Argentina.” Rene Casarsa performs and talks with St.John Flynn. |
|
Choreographers Kiki Lucas and Joe Celej describe the premiere pieces and audience favorites that they’re staging on the Houston Metropolitan Dance Company’s program, Signature Works, at the Wortham Center. |
|
"Memories, Dreams, Reflections" Pianist Rodney Waters and tenor Kenneth Gayle of Music Doing Good perform for us, previewing the ensemble’s recital, Memories, Dreams, Reflections: Looking Inward – Jung in Words and Music, which they’re at The Jung Center. Waters and Gayle are joined by narrator-reader James Conlan and Dr. Jerry Ruhl, executive director of the Jung Center. |
|
Dashing (and perpetually sun-tanned) leading man George Hamilton and veteran Broadway actor Christopher Sieber chat about Le Cage Aux Folles, The Musical. The theatrical adaptation is based on the French movie farce about what happens when a young man brings his fiancee’s conservative parents home to meet his flashy nightclub-owner father, and his dad’s drag-queen partner. The national tour of Le Cage Aux Folles, The Musical (pink feathers and all) is being presented at the Hobby Center by Theatre Under The Stars. |
-(p.jpg)
