The Houston Symphony has announced details of its 2011-12 season, with highlights to include a three-week Rachmaninoff Festival in January 2012, with all four Rachmaninoff piano concertos featuring Kirill Gerstein, who also serves as artist-in-residence for the festival. Also planned is a second HD Odyssey multimedia event featuring images of Earth taken from NASA’s shuttle missions, the International Space Station, and orbiting satellites, produced/directed by Duncan Copp; music for Orbit—HD Odyssey will include John Adams’s Short Ride in a Fast Machine and Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra. During the season the orchestra will unveil a new interactive series called ACCESS—three 80-minute-long 7 p.m. concerts on Fridays, hosted by NPR’s Miles Hoffman, which include preconcert cocktail parties and postconcert question-and-answer sessions. In May 2012, the orchestra will travel to Carnegie Hall to participate in the second Spring for Music festival. Also planned are the orchestra’s first performances at Sugar Land Baptist Church, in Fort Bend County, where the Houston Symphony and Chorus will perform Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and Handel’s Messiah.
Posted January 24, 2011
