I write about music, opera/theater, and the visual arts.

INUKSUIT IS MEANT TO BE HEARD OUTDOORS. Composed by John Luther Adams and scored for 9 to 99 percussionists, the concert-length work premiered on a mountainside in Banff, Canada in 2009 and has since been reenacted in the Alaskan wilds, New England forests, the Australian seaside, and hundreds of public spaces around the world. Described as “the ultimate environmental piece,” the work seamlessly unfolds in and reflects upon the performance environment, often to provocative effect. (Sixty-four percussionists recently performed the piece straddling both sides of the border wall separating San Diego and Tijuana, Mexico.)

Now, on Saturday, February 16, 45 musicians from across Texas will descend upon the live oak grove adjacent to Rice’s main entrance with their drums, cymbals, gongs, whirly tubes, conch shells, and glockenspiels.

ON A RECENT THURSDAY, 40 people are packed into the living room of a Museum District home. The crowd is mostly young and fairly diverse. Some lounge on mismatched couches, while others sit on the hardwood floor, chatting and sipping on bring-your-own beer and wine. The hosts are an artist couple named Megan and Davis and their willowy sphynx cat, and tonight’s concert is solely acoustic, with the “stage” just a simple corner by the fireplace, next to an exposed, glowing upright piano backed by a neon sign of blinking lips.

For many in the audience, this is their first Sofar experience. The pop-up concert series brings intimate live music shows to unusual venues, and is rapidly growing a presence in Houston. Ever since its launch in London in 2009, Sofar chapters have taken root in over 400 cities around the world, and in places like New York, Seattle, and LA, there’s a Sofar show happening almost every night.

HEARTBREAK IS ROUGH, AND IT’S UNIVERSAL. Franz Schubert’s song cycle Winterreise, written in 1828 and based off Wilhelm Müller’s 24-poem cycle of the same name, is a seminal work that translates these emotions into a musical arc. And in Savage Winter, whose Aperio/American Opera Projects co-production debuted last Friday at MATCH, composer Douglas J. Cuomo attempts to recreate Schubert’s process, but in a contemporary sonic landscape.

The result is a one-act opera that lasts for 75 minutes, scored for four musicians—tenor, piano, electric guitar, and trumpet—and featuring tenor Tony Boutté.

Boutté opens the opera as the lone, bespectacled protagonist, wandering onto the dark stage in a black coat, top hat, and messenger bag. A projection of a snowstorm flashes behind them, accompanied by a loopy recording of disjointed voices, thudding synth beats, and static noise. This is no Schubert.

THE CHANCE TO RAVE ABOUT CHORAL WRITING in a modern opera is rare, but Tarik O’Regan’s The Phoenix, a new opera commissioned and premiered last weekend by Houston Grand Opera, offers up some of the most sublime, incantatory choruses I’ve ever heard.

Directed and written by librettist John Caird, HGO’s production is ambitious in scope, covering 70 years of history in two acts, and although the dizzying pace and repetitive scene changes get old rather quickly, the strength of the cast and O’Regan’s luscious score ensures this production might stick around for a while.

Lorenzo Da Ponte’s long life, saturated with scandalous behavior and drawn out in the most unexpected of turns, is practically perfect for opera. Apart from his role as librettist for Mozart’s celebrated trio of operas (Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Così fan tutti) Da Ponte’s story is virtually unknown, but it crosses two continents and about 10-odd careers.

IN HIS LATEST INSTALLATION, GEORGE LEWIS wants you to pay attention to the weather.

Remains of the Sky is a sound and light installation in dialogue with the James Turrell Twilight Epiphany Skyspace at Rice University. A computer program collects surrounding weather data from 3 a.m. to 6 p.m. each day and translates it into a 40-minute sequence of shifting colors, rhythms, and multi-channel sound.

Lewis, who is based in NYC but has been traveling back and forth to Houston since 2007, worked on the idea for a year in collaboration with Damon Holzborn. Since the installation is based on live data, every sequence will be a new experience—a direct response to the wind, sun, and temperatures of that day. Many of the nature and water sounds were collected from Houston bayous and parks for his 2015 CAMH Whispering Bayou installation. It’s localized and based in real-time, allowing Houstonians to meditate on the immediate environment of their city. “People don’t notice the weather unless it’s raining on them,” he said. “I wanted to compress climate—an indefinable, vague concept—into something you can hear and see.”

ANA MARÍA MARTÍNEZ is a Grammy-award winning soprano and one of the most sought-after operatic artists of her generation, but she’s also a mom, and at the start of our interview she’s just picked up her 11-year-old son, Lucas, from school. “Give me just a second,” she says. “I need to make sure he gets started on his homework.”

Martínez has the type of down-to-earth and disarming personality that nearly belies her international opera diva status, and she’s totally unabashed about her love for Houston, where she’s lived since 2002.

Born in Puerto Rico and raised in New York City, Martínez arrived here in the mid ’90s as a Young Artist in the Houston Grand Opera studio, a platform that helped launch her now-monumental career. She later returned to play the role of Rosalba in HGO’s 2002 production of Daniel Catán’s Florencia en el Amazonas. She knew then that Houston would become home base.

HOUSTON’S FEARLESS NEW MUSIC ENSEMBLE LOOP38 kicks off their third season with “Behind the Scenes - Behind the Sounds,” a concert that explores the physical nature of music making with three pieces for ensemble and electronics: Maja Ratkje’s “And sing while thou on pressed flowers dost sleep” (2013); Lewis Nielson’s “USW” (2009); and Ashley Fure’s “Albatross” (2014).

According to pianist and co-founder Yvonne Chen, the concert is part of a more personal approach to programming. “This season is made up of passion projects from various people in the ensemble that reflect who we are as a whole,” she explains, adding that the group placed a special emphasis on “finding new spaces for music” that juxtapose different communities and architecture.

IF CARMEN IS BIZET’S MASTERPIECE, The Pearl Fishers is the lesser-known older sister: not quite as seductive, but equally persuasive in her own way. The Houston Grand Opera’s current production, directed by E. Loren Meeker, is a spectacle and a half, breathing new life into the work with imaginative visuals and a stellar cast. 

With a weak, almost ridiculous storyline, a straightforward retelling with period staging would have spelled doom. Thankfully, British fashion designer Zandra Rhodes’ stylized take on the Sri Lankan setting is an over-the-top display of eye-popping color, featuring exotic Rousseau-like backdrops and figurines reminiscent of Matisse cutouts. Some of her sets were a bit cartoonish; I wasn’t a fan of the trees at the beginning (aptly described by one audience member as “Spongebob, under the sea”), but the later temple set, with its vividly etched pillars and backlit stars, felt wonderfully transportive.

IF YOU THOUGHT MARK GUILIANA’S NEW GROUP, Space Heroes, had something to do with astronauts, think again.

“I get asked about the name a lot—it just refers to the space within the music,” Guiliana explains. “In a jazz quartet the piano by definition occupies quite a bit of space, and I wanted to explore what would happen and where the music would go if we removed that particular voice.”

His ensemble instead features a frontline of two horns—saxophonists Jason Rigby and Mike Lewis—with Chris Morrissey on double bass, and they’ll be making their Houston debut this Saturday as part of the Da Camera jazz series.

The last time Guiliana was in Houston was back in 2004, when he was on tour as a sideman with Israeli jazz legend Avishai Cohen.

IT’S STILL A MYSTERY why Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes—a whimsical 1926 novel about a woman who becomes a witch—remains relatively obscure. But it might be having a revival, beginning here in Houston. Based on the book, Michael Alec Rose’s new chamber opera premieres at MATCH this week, directed by Dash Waterbury and produced by Matt Lammers, Lee Hallman, and Chandler Yu.

Listed as one of The Guardian’s “100 Best Novels of All Time,” Warner’s clever, coolly subversive narrative of a spinster’s self-discovery certainly deserves a space of its own among seminal feminist works like those of Woolf, Austen, and Plath. Chronicling an Englishwoman who rejects marriage and her family’s stifling control and moves to a quaint countryside town to fulfill her own calling, Warner’s fairytale is beautiful, wry, and occasionally sinister. Its eventual verge into the supernatural is startling—shocking, even—quietly turning upside down societal and gender roles, family loyalty, and notions of good and evil.

THERE’S AN ACTION-PACKED EVENT SUNDAY EVENING AT THE MATCH, and it doesn’t involve football or commercials. Known for their visceral, dynamic music-making on stage, Houston’s conductorless ensemble, Kinetic, returns to the stage to perform four works for chamber ensemble and orchestra in their first concert of 2019, “American Spaces.”

“We’ve definitely gotten more ambitious in our programming,” says Natalie Lin, violinist and founder of the group, reflecting on the evolution of KINETIC since their first season in 2015. “I think everyone enjoys the challenge of seeing what repertoire we’re able to explore in the conductorless format and the potential for collaboration.”