The upcoming week will see you deciding how to spend your Super Bowl Sunday as well as your Valentine's Day, but that still leaves plenty of time to explore some of our choices for the best of the best Houston has to offer over the next seven days. Keep reading for our best bets, which include one of today’s best jazz vocalists, the greatest film of all time, and the work of a musical genius.
Celebrate the 70th anniversary of the alliance between the United States and the Republic of Korea on Thursday, February 9, at 6 p.m. during From the New World: Gwangju Symphony Orchestra with Kenny Broberg, a concert event hosted by the Consulate General of the Republic of Korea at the University of Houston’s Cullen Performance Hall. The program will begin with Broberg, as the pianist (a graduate of the University of Houston’s Moores School of Music) joins the orchestra to play Frédéric Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in E minor. The orchestra will then take over to present Antonin Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9. Subtitled "From the New World," the symphony is “a philosophy of inclusion rendered in music” and “one of the world's most beloved orchestral works,” featuring “a melody that is a hymn and an anthem to what American music can be.” You can reserve your free ticket here.
We are coming up on that oh-so-polarizing holiday, Valentine’s Day. Remember a few years ago when a survey showed that “Americans are falling out of love with Valentine’s Day,” with respondents calling it everything from “overrated” and “disappointing” to “cheesy” and “tacky”? Regardless, few subjects are quite as inspiring as love, and you can see that on Friday, February 10, at 7 p.m. when Insomnia Gallery presents Love You to Death: An Art Show Dedicated to Love and Loss at Hardy & Nance Studios. The free, all-ages-welcome (as well as dogs) show returns for its seventh edition with more than 30 local artists and photographers displaying love, loss, and everything in between. Bad Astronaut Brewing Company, Equal Parts Brewing and Eureka Heights Brewery will be on hand to provide the drinks because, with Valentine’s Day around the corner, you just might need one.
On Friday, February 10, at 8 p.m. the Houston Symphony continues their Songs of the Earth Festival with a program highlighting the work that lends its name to the festival: Gustav Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde. For Mahler The Song of the Earth, the Symphony will welcome mezzo soprano Sasha Cooke and tenor Clay Hilley to Jones Hall to tackle the “death-impregnated” song cycle, comprised of lyrics from “ancient Chinese poetry” and considered to be Mahler’s “farewell to life” following a triple whammy of woe – the passing of his daughter, the loss of his position at the Vienna Court Opera, and the diagnosis of a terminal heart condition. Performances continue at 8 p.m. on Saturday, February 11, and 2:30 p.m. on Sunday, February 12. Tickets for the in-hall can be purchased here for $29 to $109. If you can’t make it out, you can buy a ticket to view the livestream of Saturday night’s concert here for $20.
Cécile McLorin Salvant, “jazz’s most decorated vocalist,” a singer of “standards, show tunes and old novelties in a taut, flinty, elusively beautiful voice, erring toward material with difficult lyrics and tough places in history,” will make her return to the DACAMERA stage on Friday, February 10, at 8 p.m. at the Wortham Theater Center. A multiple Grammy winner and MacArthur fellow, Salvant has said “what I’m trying to do with my music is that people feel like I understand what they’re going through, that I’m going through something similar to them. I want to exercise empathy – which is the most important (thing) to me – and everything else is kind of extraneous.” Tickets are still available here for $42.50 to $72.50.
Poetry City is the destination for a man looking to escape his own life in Richard Foreman’s one-act, 75-minute play Eddie Goes to Poetry City, the latest offering from Catastrophic Theatre, opening on Friday, February 10, at 8 p.m. Director Greg Dean told the Houston Press that Foreman's play will appeal to those “with a decent sense of humor” as the play doesn’t offer up a “standard linear narrative. It's a whole lot of beginning again. Starting over, interruption, frustration. The people on stage are certainly recognizable types. But it doesn't really obey any of the rules that normally go into making good theater.” Performances will continue at 7:30 p.m. Thursdays, 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays and 7:30 p.m. Monday, February 27, at The MATCH through March 4. Tickets are pay-what-you-can with a suggested price of $35 here.
When an African-American businessman becomes director at a foundation known for its art collection, he meets resistance when he wants to add eight pieces of African art from storage. It’s a story reminiscent of real events that happened at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, and on Saturday, February 11, at 7:30 p.m. you can see it when Main Street Theater opens Thomas Gibbons’ Permanent Collection. Steven J. Scott, who plays Sterling North in the production, recently told the Houston Press that the play’s two main characters “want something so innocent and they fight each other to get it,” and that he thinks “people will discover the humanness in these characters who are black and white, who see things in their own way, and they have a conflict that each of them take too far.” Performances will continue at 7:30 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays and 3 p.m. Sundays through March 5. Tickets can be purchased here for $35 to $59.
Check out the newly crowned “Greatest Film of All Time” – as determined by the British Film Institute and Sight and Sound magazine – Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston on Sunday, February 12, at 2 p.m. Chantal Akerman’s 1975 film “charts the breakdown of a bourgeois Belgian housewife, mother and part-time prostitute over the course of three days.” It’s a commitment – clocking in at about three and a half hours – and is “inescapably a woman’s film” – the first by a woman director to make the list’s top ten – but in its depiction of “women’s oppression” with monotony and fixed cameras, “Akerman transforms cinema, itself so often an instrument of women’s oppression, into a liberating force.” There will be another screening on Saturday, February 11, at 5 p.m. Tickets for either screening can be purchased for $7 to $9.
Try to pick your favorite song from Leonard Bernstein. Whether you declare Bernstein “the greatest and most important classical music figure in American history” or hedge your bets and say “arguably the most prominent figure in American classical music of the second half of the twentieth century,” it’s going to be a challenge. Luckily, on Monday, February 13, at 7:30 p.m. the odds are good your pick will appear when Paul Hope Cabaret presents Glitter and Be Gay: Leonard Bernstein’s Broadway at Ovations Night Club. Paul Hope will emcee an evening featuring ten performers (including special guests Susan Shofner and Kevin and Theresa Cooney) bringing some of Bernstein’s greatest works to life, including music from West Side Story, Candide, On the Town, and Peter Pan. Two additional performances are scheduled for 7:30 p.m. on Monday, February 20 and 27. Tickets can be purchased here for $15 to $125.
Celebrate the 70th anniversary of the alliance between the United States and the Republic of Korea on Thursday, February 9, at 6 p.m. during From the New World: Gwangju Symphony Orchestra with Kenny Broberg, a concert event hosted by the Consulate General of the Republic of Korea at the University of Houston’s Cullen Performance Hall. The program will begin with Broberg, as the pianist (a graduate of the University of Houston’s Moores School of Music) joins the orchestra to play Frédéric Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in E minor. The orchestra will then take over to present Antonin Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9. Subtitled "From the New World," the symphony is “a philosophy of inclusion rendered in music” and “one of the world's most beloved orchestral works,” featuring “a melody that is a hymn and an anthem to what American music can be.” You can reserve your free ticket here.
We are coming up on that oh-so-polarizing holiday, Valentine’s Day. Remember a few years ago when a survey showed that “Americans are falling out of love with Valentine’s Day,” with respondents calling it everything from “overrated” and “disappointing” to “cheesy” and “tacky”? Regardless, few subjects are quite as inspiring as love, and you can see that on Friday, February 10, at 7 p.m. when Insomnia Gallery presents Love You to Death: An Art Show Dedicated to Love and Loss at Hardy & Nance Studios. The free, all-ages-welcome (as well as dogs) show returns for its seventh edition with more than 30 local artists and photographers displaying love, loss, and everything in between. Bad Astronaut Brewing Company, Equal Parts Brewing and Eureka Heights Brewery will be on hand to provide the drinks because, with Valentine’s Day around the corner, you just might need one.
On Friday, February 10, at 8 p.m. the Houston Symphony continues their Songs of the Earth Festival with a program highlighting the work that lends its name to the festival: Gustav Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde. For Mahler The Song of the Earth, the Symphony will welcome mezzo soprano Sasha Cooke and tenor Clay Hilley to Jones Hall to tackle the “death-impregnated” song cycle, comprised of lyrics from “ancient Chinese poetry” and considered to be Mahler’s “farewell to life” following a triple whammy of woe – the passing of his daughter, the loss of his position at the Vienna Court Opera, and the diagnosis of a terminal heart condition. Performances continue at 8 p.m. on Saturday, February 11, and 2:30 p.m. on Sunday, February 12. Tickets for the in-hall can be purchased here for $29 to $109. If you can’t make it out, you can buy a ticket to view the livestream of Saturday night’s concert here for $20.
Cécile McLorin Salvant, “jazz’s most decorated vocalist,” a singer of “standards, show tunes and old novelties in a taut, flinty, elusively beautiful voice, erring toward material with difficult lyrics and tough places in history,” will make her return to the DACAMERA stage on Friday, February 10, at 8 p.m. at the Wortham Theater Center. A multiple Grammy winner and MacArthur fellow, Salvant has said “what I’m trying to do with my music is that people feel like I understand what they’re going through, that I’m going through something similar to them. I want to exercise empathy – which is the most important (thing) to me – and everything else is kind of extraneous.” Tickets are still available here for $42.50 to $72.50.
Poetry City is the destination for a man looking to escape his own life in Richard Foreman’s one-act, 75-minute play Eddie Goes to Poetry City, the latest offering from Catastrophic Theatre, opening on Friday, February 10, at 8 p.m. Director Greg Dean told the Houston Press that Foreman's play will appeal to those “with a decent sense of humor” as the play doesn’t offer up a “standard linear narrative. It's a whole lot of beginning again. Starting over, interruption, frustration. The people on stage are certainly recognizable types. But it doesn't really obey any of the rules that normally go into making good theater.” Performances will continue at 7:30 p.m. Thursdays, 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays and 7:30 p.m. Monday, February 27, at The MATCH through March 4. Tickets are pay-what-you-can with a suggested price of $35 here.
When an African-American businessman becomes director at a foundation known for its art collection, he meets resistance when he wants to add eight pieces of African art from storage. It’s a story reminiscent of real events that happened at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, and on Saturday, February 11, at 7:30 p.m. you can see it when Main Street Theater opens Thomas Gibbons’ Permanent Collection. Steven J. Scott, who plays Sterling North in the production, recently told the Houston Press that the play’s two main characters “want something so innocent and they fight each other to get it,” and that he thinks “people will discover the humanness in these characters who are black and white, who see things in their own way, and they have a conflict that each of them take too far.” Performances will continue at 7:30 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays and 3 p.m. Sundays through March 5. Tickets can be purchased here for $35 to $59.
Check out the newly crowned “Greatest Film of All Time” – as determined by the British Film Institute and Sight and Sound magazine – Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston on Sunday, February 12, at 2 p.m. Chantal Akerman’s 1975 film “charts the breakdown of a bourgeois Belgian housewife, mother and part-time prostitute over the course of three days.” It’s a commitment – clocking in at about three and a half hours – and is “inescapably a woman’s film” – the first by a woman director to make the list’s top ten – but in its depiction of “women’s oppression” with monotony and fixed cameras, “Akerman transforms cinema, itself so often an instrument of women’s oppression, into a liberating force.” There will be another screening on Saturday, February 11, at 5 p.m. Tickets for either screening can be purchased for $7 to $9.
Try to pick your favorite song from Leonard Bernstein. Whether you declare Bernstein “the greatest and most important classical music figure in American history” or hedge your bets and say “arguably the most prominent figure in American classical music of the second half of the twentieth century,” it’s going to be a challenge. Luckily, on Monday, February 13, at 7:30 p.m. the odds are good your pick will appear when Paul Hope Cabaret presents Glitter and Be Gay: Leonard Bernstein’s Broadway at Ovations Night Club. Paul Hope will emcee an evening featuring ten performers (including special guests Susan Shofner and Kevin and Theresa Cooney) bringing some of Bernstein’s greatest works to life, including music from West Side Story, Candide, On the Town, and Peter Pan. Two additional performances are scheduled for 7:30 p.m. on Monday, February 20 and 27. Tickets can be purchased here for $15 to $125.
