“Joshua Bell, Itzhak Perlman and music from ‘Star Wars’ will headline the Houston Symphony’s 2018-19 season,” writes Wei-Huan Chen in Wednesday’s (1/24) Houston Chronicle. “The next season’s lineup of concerts, announced today, also features Bartók’s [one-act opera] ‘Bluebeard’s Castle,’ Mahler’s ‘Resurrection’ [Symphony] and [movements from] Charles Ives’s [Symphony No. 4] sprinkled throughout the year. Movies are in the spotlight … with live performances with film for ‘Star Wars: A New Hope,’ ‘Apollo 13,’ ‘Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban,’ ‘Home Alone’ and ‘An American in Paris.’ … Live performances of popular films by symphony orchestras have seen a boom in the past decade…. [Executive Director John] Mangum welcomes this resurgence, saying he hopes the events also bring new audiences to the classical season.” Also planned are the world premiere of Jimmy López’s Aurora for violin and orchestra, with soloist Leticia Moreno; Jeffrey Kahane as conductor and pianist in a program including Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G and Timo Andres’s Paraphrase on Themes of Brian Eno; an “Ella Fitzgerald Songbook” pops program with vocalists Montego Glover, Capathia Jenkins, and N’Kenge, conducted by Steven Reineke; symphonies by Beethoven, Elgar, Mozart, Prokofiev, Schumann, Shostakovich, Stravinsky, and Tchaikovsky; and family programs.
Posted January 25, 2018
