Opera Cues Fall 2023 - Falstaff

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A MESSAGE FROM THE GENERAL DIRECTOR AND CEO

Welcome to the Wortham, the launch of Houston Grand Opera’s 2023-24 season, and the beginning of our quest for truth and wisdom through a centuries-old art form—the kind that only comes after a lifetime of seeking. Our journey begins with the two extraordinary offerings in our fall repertoire: HGO-commissioned worldpremiere opera Intelligence, and Verdi’s final masterpiece, Falstaff

Falstaff made its premiere at Milan’s La Scala in 1893, when Verdi was nearly 80, and remains a singular achievement. The opera—an unexpected gift to the world, written during an era when most people didn’t survive past 40—is a beautiful illustration of the depth and richness that comes with a life spent exploring human stories. It is also the composer’s final, wizened pronouncement on the only thing to do in the face of life’s absurdity: laugh.

A cast of world-class artists will perform the story of Shakespeare’s lovably dissolute knight, led by baritone Reginald Smith, Jr. as the titular schemer. He’ll be joined by soprano Nicole Heaston as Alice, baritone Blake Denson as Ford, and soprano Andrea Carroll as Nannetta. Paula Suozzi directs, with the wonderful Maestro Patrick Summers, now embarking upon his milestone 25th year with HGO, at the podium.

It is so often during the later chapters of an artist’s evolution when they break the most ground, and there is no better example of that than the new opera taking pride of place to open our season: Jake Heggie, Gene Scheer, and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar’s Intelligence

This opera is unique in the repertoire for melding genres as the shared brainchild of three dazzling minds. Heggie is the most important opera composer alive today (and the world’s most youthful mature artist). Scheer, a brilliant librettist, is Heggie’s long-time collaborator. And Zollar, the opera’s impressively prolific director/choreographer, is the founder of the renowned Urban Bush Women. While she has been pushing boundaries since starting her company in 1984, Zollar has indisputably broken them with her first—but not last—opera.

A new artwork of this caliber requires a world-class cast to match, and I’m thrilled to welcome this one, starting with mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton (Elizabeth Van Lew), soprano Janai Brugger (Mary Jane Bowser), and mezzo-soprano J’Nai Bridges (Lucinda), with conductor Kwamé Ryan making his HGO debut alongside Brugger and Bridges.

Intelligence is HGO’s 75th world premiere. As a company, we couldn’t have gotten to this place of innovation without the wisdom and hard-won experience we’ve been building since our founding in 1955. And, needless to say, we couldn’t have gotten here without you, our dear audience. I hope you enjoy your time with us.

Khori Dastoor General Director and CEO Margaret Alkek Williams Chair

HON. THERESA AND DR. PETER CHANG, CHAIRS

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 2, 2024

CULLEN THEATER

HGO.ORG/COA

Opera Cues is published by Houston Grand Opera Association; all rights reserved. Opera Cues is produced under the direction of Chief Marketing and Experiences Officer Jennifer Davenport and Director of Communications Catherine Matusow, by Houston Grand Opera’s Audiences Department.

Editor

Catherine Matusow

Designer

Chelsea Crouse

Contributors

Favour Aimufua

Jennifer Bowman

Khori Dastoor

Jeremy Johnson

Sarah Kaufman

Alisa Magallón

Brian Speck

Patrick Summers

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At Houston Methodist, we’re proud partners in helping artists achieve peak performance, week in and week out. We treat artists and their unique needs, while bringing the same level of specialized care to every patient we serve.

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Photo Credit: Lynn Lane Photography

Photo credit: Karen Almond

HGO BOARD OF DIRECTORS 2023-24

OFFICERS

Claire Liu, Chair of the Board

Allyn Risley, Senior Chair of the Board

Janet Langford Carrig, Chair Emeritus of the Board

Lynn Wyatt, Vice Chair of the Board

MEMBERS AT LARGE

Richard E. Agee

Thomas R. Ajamie

Robin Angly *

John S. Arnoldy *

Christopher V. Bacon, Secretary; General Counsel

Michelle Beale, Governance Committee Chair

Astley Blair, Audit Committee Chair

Albert Chao

Louise G. Chapman

Mathilda Cochran, Community & Learning Committee Chair

Albert O. Cornelison Jr. *

James W. Crownover

Khori Dastoor

Joshua Davidson

David B. Duthu *

Warren A. Ellsworth IV, M.D., Butler Studio Committee Vice Chair

Benjamin Fink, Finance Committee Chair

Joe Geagea

Michaela Greenan, Audit Committee Vice Chair

Dr. Ellen R. Gritz, Community & Learning Committee Vice Chair

Selda Gunsel

Matthew Healey, Finance Committee Vice Chair

Richard Husseini

José M. Ivo, Philanthropy Committee Vice Chair

Myrtle Jones

Marianne Kah, Houston Grand Opera Endowment, Inc. Chair

David LePori, Governance Committee Vice Chair

Gabriel Loperena, Philanthropy Committee Chair

HOUSTON GRAND OPERA ASSOCIATION CHAIRS

1955–58

Elva Lobit

1958–60

Stanley W. Shipnes

1960–62

William W. Bland

1962–64

Thomas D. Anderson

1964–66

Marshall F. Wells

1966–68

John H. Heinzerling

1968–70

Lloyd P. Fadrique

1970–71

Ben F. Love

1971–73

Joe H. Foy

1973–74

Gray C. Wakefield

1974–75

Charles T. Bauer

1975–77

Maurice J. Aresty

1977–79

Searcy Bracewell

1979–81

Robert Cizik

1981–83

Terrylin G. Neale

1983–84

Barry Munitz

1984–85

Jenard M. Gross

1985–87

Dr. Thomas D. Barrow

1987–89

John M. Seidl

1989–91

James L. Ketelsen

Beth Madison *

Paul Marsden

Sid Moorhead

Sara Morgan

Terrylin G. Neale, Houston Grand Opera Endowment, Inc. Secretary; Treasurer

Ward Pennebaker, Audiences Committee Co-Chair

Cynthia Petrello

Gloria M. Portela

Allyson Pritchett

Matthew L. Ringel, Audiences Committee Co-Chair

Kelly Brunetti Rose

Glen A. Rosenbaum

Jack A. Roth, M.D., Butler Studio Committee Chair

Harlan C. Stai

John G. Turner *

Veer Vasishta

Alfredo Vilas

Margaret Alkek Williams

*Senior Director

J. LANDIS (LANNY) MARTIN

Chair, HGO Board, 1993-95

Lanny Martin was a passionate and generous lover of opera, whose leadership at HGO left an indelible mark on our organization. Our former esteemed General Director, David Gockley, remembers him as “a great volunteer leader, maybe the best I worked with over the years." Lanny also chaired the board of Central City Opera, and supported San Francisco Opera and Opera America. On behalf of our board, I extend our condolences and gratitude to Lanny's widow Sharon and his daughters, Sarah and Emily. —Gloria M. Portela on behalf of the HGO Board of Directors

1991–93

Constantine S. Nicandros

1993–95

J. Landis Martin

1995–97

Robert C. McNair

1997–99

Dennis R. Carlyle, M.D.

Susan H. Carlyle, M.D.

1999–2001

Archie W. Dunham

2001–03

Harry C. Pinson

2003–04

James T. Hackett

2004–07

John S. Arnoldy

2007–09

Robert L. Cavnar

2009

Gloria M. Portela

2009–11

Glen A. Rosenbaum

2011–13

Beth Madison

2013–16

John Mendelsohn, M.D.

2016–18

James W. Crownover

2018–20

Janet Langford Carrig

2020–22

Allyn Risley

2022–present

Claire Liu

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On the eve of the world premiere of composer Jake Heggie, librettist Gene Scheer, and director/choreographer Jawole Willa Jo Zollar’s Intelligence, HGO hosted a series of community events so that Houstonians could learn more about its creation.

These conversations provided participants with the opportunity get to know the opera’s creators, learn about what goes into creating a world premiere, and delve into the complexity surrounding telling this powerful story based on historic events.

Events included “The Art of Composer Jake Heggie,” presented in partnership with the Rice Shepherd School of Music; “Let the Truth Be Told,” held with our partners at the Buffalo Soldiers National Museum;

BRAVA!

AN OPERA IS BORN

HGO hosts a conversation series surrounding Intelligence for the Houston community.

and a pair of dance masterclasses shared with the community in partnership with the Houston Ballet, led by Zollar and members of the Urban Bush Women at the Margaret Alkek Williams Center for Dance.

“HGO hosted these events so that Houstonians beyond our usual audiences could connect to the historical, cultural, and creative narratives waiting to be discovered within this new opera,” says HGO Director of Community and Learning Jennifer Bowman.

“Through these collaborative events held at community partner sites, we wanted to provide a window into the way these brilliant minds came together as they innovated the art form to tell this story, and share the questions they asked themselves along the way.”

Khori Dastoor and Molly Dill are recognized for exceptional leadership.

The Houston Business Journal has announced its hotly anticipated annual Most Admired CEOs awards, featuring the Bayou City’s most inspiring leaders in fields including law, education, health care, and the fine arts. The HGO team was thrilled that the journal chose our own General Director and CEO, Khori Dastoor, as a 2023 honoree. The vision Dastoor brings to her role is truly transformative—she helps the company turn its operatic dreams into reality every day!

In other exciting news, the HBJ has highlighted a group of incredible Houston leaders who have demonstrated excellence in their careers and community with its annual Women Who Mean Business Awards. This year the publication honored another forward-thinking member of the HGO leadership team, COO Molly Dill, as one of them, and the award was well-deserved. Dill has been behind the scenes, tirelessly pursuing HGO’s mission of staging great art for all Houstonians, for 20 years and counting.

Join us in applauding these two dynamic women!

Let the Truth Be Told panel moderator Quodesia Johnson with Gene Scheer, Cale Carter, deniz lopez, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, and Harrison Guy

Photo credit: Michael Bishop

Congratulations to Khori Dastoor and Molly Dill!

HERE'S TO 25!

HGO Artistic and Music Director Patrick Summers reaches a career milestone.

It is no exaggeration to say that Houston Grand Opera would be a different company if Maestro Patrick Summers had not joined the organization as music director back in 1999. Two years later, the HGO Orchestra launched under his leadership. From that moment until today, the Maestro has raised and raised the musical bar, dedicating himself to honing the artistry of this group of world-class musicians as he’s led the orchestra to become an internationally recognized juggernaut, while bringing joy to audiences from his place at the podium.

And that is far from the only realm where Summers’s impact has been immeasurable, both before and after being named HGO’s artistic and music director in 2011. “When I came to HGO I knew I would be joining a kindred spirit,” says HGO General Director and CEO Khori Dastoor. “For decades, Patrick has identified and fostered the talents of the best artists and creatives in the world—singers like Tammy Wilson and Christine Goerke, composers like Joel Thompson—while advancing the company’s mission of commissioning new American work for modern audiences. Today there is no limit to what we might achieve together. I’m so grateful to have such a brilliant collaborator by my side.”

Here’s to 25 years with HGO, Maestro Summers! All of Houston is lucky you landed here.

Clockwise from top right: Patrick Summers and Khori Dastoor; Summers and composer Tod Machover; the Maestro at the podium; Summers and composer Carlisle Floyd

Dear Opera Patron:

On behalf of ConocoPhillips, welcome to Intelligence. Combining timeless themes of heritage, duty, and betrayal with an astounding and little-known story from American history, this world premiere opera has the makings of a classic.

With our world headquarters in Houston, ConocoPhillips shares HGO’s commitment to offering Houstonians world-class artistic experiences in the Bayou City. We are a proud underwriter of the season-opening opera Intelligence, and a longtime champion of HGO’s Community & Learning programs, which offer students, teachers, and families the opportunity to participate in annual performances, workshops, and premieres.

As a dynamic company, ConocoPhillips understands the importance of new ideas as we strive to constantly innovate to address the changing needs of our community. That’s why we are thrilled you’ve chosen to join us for this extraordinary new opera tonight. We hope you enjoy the show and the season ahead.

Sincerely,

Kelly B. Rose Senior Vice President, Legal and General Counsel ConocoPhillips

TO FEEL THE TRUTH

A conversation with Intelligence librettist Gene Scheer

By Khori Dastoor, General Director and CEO

Gene Scheer, right, in Houston for rehearsals of Intelligence

Photo credit: Lawrence Elizabeth Knox

As part of his process, Gene traveled to Richmond, Virginia. He visited the White House of the Confederacy and the prominent white Episcopal Church, St. John’s, where Mary Jane was baptized. He looked out from the spot where the Van Lew Mansion once stood, gazing toward the bottom of the hill, where enslaved people like Mary Jane were once bought and sold.

He read all the scholarship he could find. He spoke with experts. He went back and forth with his longtime creative collaborator, composer Jake Heggie, ping-ponging music and words to one another. He met with Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, co-creator and director/ choreographer for the opera, at their favorite spot in New York’s West Village, to discuss the story, the ways dance could help tell it, and—beyond the narrative— make them feel the story. Finally, he wrote the libretto. The team workshopped it. He went back again.

And then, in the way that the truth so often does, events long buried—in this case, for more than 150 years—revealed themselves. “After I wrote the libretto,” Gene told me, “a letter was unearthed.”

The letter, which Mary Jane sent to Elizabeth from New York in 1870, had turned up at an auction house. Mary Jane had written her fellow spy to turn down an invitation to travel back to Richmond. Verifying the letter had been a laborious endeavor. Separating myth from fact is always a challenge for historians, and in this case, the truth had been buried on purpose— Elizabeth literally kept her diary underground, so that only portions have survived. Mary Jane used multiple names and obfuscated the details of her extraordinary story throughout her lifetime, and it doesn’t take historical documentation to understand why. She must have been scared to death.

SCHEER

The emergence of the letter, a few scant years ago, revealed that, counter to what scholars had previously thought, the two women did, in fact, speak after the war. And while its discovery didn’t change the libretto for Intelligence, it did serve as a reminder that the truth has a power all its own, and that history is all around us, still coming to light.

That letter, which sold at auction, added a new layer to what is known about the complex relationship between the women at the center of Intelligence, a relationship that has fascinated Gene and his co-creators from the start.

While current scholarship provides access to a set of remarkable facts about these two spies from history, there are huge gaps in the record. We know that Mary Jane was enslaved to Elizabeth’s family, and that she was singled out for special treatment—but why? What was the nature of the women’s relationship? And what did it feel like to risk their lives for the sake of a cause? These are questions Gene asked himself again and again. To answer them, he knew, the art form would have to come in.

“What is truth?” he mused during our conversation. “In opera, whether it’s a fictitious story or a nonfiction story, we are tasked with what I call ‘emotional archeology.’ That’s what music and the human voice can do so expressively, to get that feeling. And what Jawole’s dance, and her incredible dancers, are accomplishing is, again, what does it feel like? What are the characters’ thoughts? ”

As he and his co-creators traveled to the emotional heart of the story, a character emerged, one that

MORE THAN 150 YEARS AFTER THE CIVIL WAR, GENE

SET ABOUT WRITING THE LIBRETTO FOR INTELLIGENCE , HGO’S NEW OPERA ABOUT TWO BRAVE WOMEN IN CONFEDERATE VIRGINIA WHO WORKED TOGETHER TO SPY FOR THE UNION: MARY JANE BOWSER AND ELIZABETH VAN LEW.

would break open the riddle of the women spies’ relationship. She was not someone Gene had read about, or come across in his travels, or learned about in conversations with historians. In fact, there was no record of her anywhere. Yet she was quite real. That character is Mary Jane’s mother. In Intelligence, she is called Lucinda, and she is the embodiment of truths that cannot be buried.

“She was written out of the record,” Gene said. “When you’re Black and you’re a woman and you’re enslaved— considered property—there is nothing. She’s representing all of the people who have been erased.”

“I’ll put it this way,” he said. “There are so many unmarked tributaries flowing into the river of America. And the power of America is based on all of them feeding into the historical record, or the river, that’s flowing forward. And there’s no part of the American story in which the tributaries are more unmarked than the story of what happened to enslaved people, and particularly Black women, in American history.

Left: There were many conversations about the opera and its story during the workshop process. Pictured: a 2021 workshop at University of Colorado Boulder.

Photo credit: David Starry for CU New Opera Workshop

Below: The relationship between Mary Jane Bowser and Elizabeth Van Lew has fascinated Scheer from the start.

Is this a story for Gene to tell? It’s something he has struggled with, and that members of the cast and creative team have discussed a lot. He’s grateful for the guidance he’s received, especially from Jawole. He’s rewritten portions of the libretto more than once. Ultimately, he views the story Intelligence tells as an American one.

“Honestly, Khori,” he said, “Elizabeth Van Lew worked on behalf of the Union and showed incredible bravery. Yet she wasn’t able to understand, in the story that we tell, the extent of her own racism. And to me, that’s one of the parts of this story that ties it to what’s happening in America right now.”

It’s not easy, Gene said, to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. “That was part of the challenge of this, but also part of the excitement, to try to feel what this felt like for other people.” He knows the libretto, the choreography, and the score can only get there together. And he believes, with his whole heart, that what he, Jawole, and Jake have created possesses the power to push society forward.

“So for people to understand where we are now, they have to understand where we came from. We have to understand not only that enslaved people built America, but that they fought for America, and without the contribution of African Americans in this, we would not have the country that we have now.

“Even now, there’s all these efforts to expunge the record, to not explore the record, of the contributions of African Americans to the nation’s story. And I think that if you want to move forward, you have to know where you come from. You have to know the truth of it.” ∎

LEONARD FOGLIA Director

NOVEMBER

the creators of Everest comes a new opera about the inspiring true story of French journalist Jean-Dominique Bauby’s life-altering paralysis. Based on the best-selling memoir, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

Presenting Sponsor: Martha Peak Rochelle

Supporting Sponsors: CeCe and Ford Lacy; Martha Allday; Greg Swalwell and Terry Connor

From

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

SEATS FROM

GREAT

BORN TO LAUGH

Verdi’s great comedy, Falstaff , demands a full roster of stars.

By Patrick Summers, Artistic and Music Director

Falstaff is one of the happiest operas imaginable, a real musical miracle, but it has never enjoyed the deeper popularity of some of Verdi’s other operas, like Aida or La traviata. Why?

Think about the difference between Olympic team sports and a solo sport like diving. In diving, your competition is solely your own personal best, and it is very possible that during the Olympics there will be diving stars—but how many people can name an

entire swim team? Therein lies the essential difference between Falstaff and La traviata.

Falstaff is a classic ensemble opera, and opera audiences have generally gravitated toward operas that are star vehicles. It certainly isn’t that Falstaff doesn’t have starring roles—it actually has several extraordinary ones, especially the title character, played this fall at HGO by Reginald Smith, Jr.—but it has many smaller roles that each contribute something vital to its hilarity.

Photo credit: Karen Almond

The cast of Falstaff includes many HGO favorites. Pictured here: Nicole Heaston in The Elixir of Love, Reginald Smith, Jr. in The Wreckers , Andrea Carroll in The Pearl Fishers , Blake Denson in Dialogues of the Carmelites

Photo credits: Lynn Lane and Michael Bishop

True ensemble operas are conceived by their composers so that no one singer carries the entire performance. No one would classify La traviata, Madame Butterfly, or Norma as ensemble operas, because their success is so dependent upon the gifts of one singer. These operas do require many other singers with difficult roles, plus choruses and orchestras all working in beautiful ensemble, but an audience can still have a fulfilling experience with them even if some other element is uneven. Not ensemble operas, which are a full team sport, so there can be no weak links.

The great ensemble operas tend to be comedies, unsurprisingly, as the same is true of plays and films. There are some dramatic standouts in films, like 12 Angry Men or The Big Chill, but largely the great ensemble films are comedies like Ocean’s 11, or one of the most unforgettable ensemble efforts, Stanley Kramer’s It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World

Nevertheless, 15 years later he presented, to enormous surprise and delight, his Otello at La Scala, having been convinced to compose again by the young and enterprising composer/poet Arrigo Boito. It would be difficult to imagine the impact made by the firework of Otello exploding onto the world in 1887, with all operatic talking then being Wagnerian (the Bayreuth Festival had opened in 1876) or about Massenet, who was almost Verdi’s equal in the public’s mind while he was alive, though history has not placed him on nearly the same pedestal as Wagner and Verdi.

Surely then, it was thought, Otello would be Verdi’s last opera. Verdi spent the year following Otello at his country estate Sant’Agata, between Bologna and Modena, where he was also involved in endowing a hospital that he took a great hand in designing. It was two years later, in 1879, that Boito handed him the proposed scenario of Falstaff, knowing that if anything could tempt Verdi out of retirement, it was a comedy.

In opera, The Marriage of Figaro and Falstaff are the two standout ensemble works, though both have a string of great starring roles as well. But there are others: Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi may be the single greatest ensemble hour in opera, and it works like a giant cackling clock. Structurally, Gianni Schicchi, composed in 1917-18, handed the movies the perfect template for the popular screwball comedies of cinema’s beginnings. You can see opening credits roll when hearing the opera’s first moments, even though it was composed almost a generation before film soundtracks.

That Falstaff was the work of a 19th-century octogenarian, which was itself a rarity, makes it all the more miraculous. Most people thought Aida, composed in 1871 when Verdi was 57 years old, was at least the beginning of his retirement, if not the finale of his career. He was, by the time of Aida, enormously wealthy, internationally famous, and a hero in newly united Italy. He had nothing more to prove.

Verdi had not written a comedy since his youth in 1840, when his second opera had been the unsuccessful Un giorno di regno (“A one-day reign”), which was composed in an unrecognizably different world from the late 19th century world in which he would compose Falstaff.

Falstaff was composed in secrecy in case Verdi didn’t live to finish it. Very few composers had the length of life that he had, and very few exhibited such extraordinary changes in their musical style. Verdi’s music, always both effervescent and full of dramatic perfection, spanned the 19th century. His early operas were Italian historical pageants, sometimes in the guise of settings in other countries, and always in the mold long-established by Rossini and Donizetti. By the time of Falstaff, his style had totally altered, and it remains in a singular place in opera, as an exemplar of what the greatest operatic comedy could be.

Verdi liked to cultivate a public image of being a country man who was never fully comfortable in sophisticated urban centers of intellect and art. But this was a construction. Verdi was one of the deep souls of western art, consumed with literature, especially Shakespeare, Schiller, and his fellow Italians like Manzoni, to whom he dedicated his extraordinary Requiem. Verdi had a rare ability to listen to life and recreate it in music, absorbing into his art what others only heard as silence. Falstaff is perhaps Verdi’s most human work for the theater, just as the title character was one of Shakespeare’s most humane, funny, and empathic characters. We all already know him, because everyone’s life has a Falstaff in it somewhere.

The opera is ostensibly based on Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, but it includes character references from the other two enormous plays in which the character of Falstaff appears, Henry IV and Henry V What Boito and Verdi arranged and re-wrote

overarching brief of the Studio is to train the next generation of leading operatic singers. But for all of the emphasis on their individual talents, the experience of being in the Studio is an ensemble one. There is no need for more intemperate and capricious artists in the world, no matter how titillating their antics momentarily may be. The future of the art, we believe, depends on an industry filled with good artistic citizens.

Being a musician is very solitary, what with the hours of technical practice it takes to become proficient at any instrument. Approximately 10,000 hours are required for basic mastery of any art, according to Canadian author and statistician Malcolm Gladwell, and musicians who heard or read his assessment instantly recognized it as a truth. We’ve never studied it, but I imagine it correlates quite well to the years spent in the Butler Studio.

Several generations of former Butler Studio members return to their home company in Falstaff, and they are

is a much better drama than Shakespeare’s Merry Wives, an enjoyable play full of dramatic holes, and together they wrote a comedy that dances along with sweet thrilling music and complex linguistic play and rhyming jokes.

Falstaff was completed in the fall of 1892 and was in rehearsal by the early months of the following year, opening in February 1893, several months shy of Verdi’s 80th birthday that October. In an era when only the privileged saw 80 at all, to have written such a brilliant smiling work at that stage of life was, and remains, one of the astonishing accomplishments of his era. The explosive final C Major fugue that closes Falstaff is one of the great epitaphs of any artist who ever lived.

Pertinent to Falstaff, the Butler Studio at HGO is a major ensemble builder. Studio artists are brought to Houston only after rigorous competition, and the

joined by colleagues who have been in similarly highprofile young artist programs elsewhere. This Falstaff cast represents several generations of opera stars, from the veteran to the newcomer. They also each represent the artistic qualities around which we have slowly and steadily built the Studio and the company for many years: radiant vocalism, imagination, integrity, and high work ethic.

What the Italian musical titan Arturo Toscanini dreamed for La Scala in the 1930s, before the horrors of war halted all dreams, was an “ensemble of stars.” Post-pandemic, in a fully changed opera world, and nearly a century later, Houston Grand Opera can share Toscanini’s dream, and with casts like ours for Falstaff we can finally realize that his dream is within sight. ∎

THROUGH DANCE, JAWOLE

WILLA JO ZOLLAR

FINDS

THE BEATING HEART OF INTELLIGENCE .

by Sarah Kaufman

Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, the director, choreographer, and co-creator of Intelligence, center, with Urban Bush Women dancers and renderings of designs for the opera's costumes (this page and next spread).

Photo credit: Rose Eichenbaum

Mortal danger, colossal ambition, clever disguises. The spy story at the heart of HGO’s season-opening opera Intelligence feels like something out of a historical-fiction Mission: Impossible

Except it’s a true story. And the spies were Southern women, Black and white, who helped win the Civil War.

The heroines of this world-premiere opera sent Confederate secrets to Union generals—and then they dropped out of history. Source materials leave a great many holes. So how do you bring such an improbable, daredevil saga to the stage? For Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, the choreographer and director of Intelligence, there was only one way.

She had to find its truth in the body.

Her body, for starters.

“My style is visceral,” said Zollar. “I wanted to understand the story not just on the page but through the different sites, to sense the power of this story.”

So Zollar wandered around the whereabouts of the events in Intelligence. You could say she relied on her body’s intelligence as she walked in the footsteps of the opera’s two main characters: Virginia heiress and abolitionist Elizabeth Van Lew and her young co-conspirator, born into slavery in the Van Lew household. She went by several names; in the opera she’s known as Mary Jane Bowser.

Zollar toured the site of the Van Lew mansion in Richmond, Virginia (which is now a school), absorbing the sweeping view that once led down to a prison yard, where Elizabeth would carry food to the Union soldiers held there. She hid escapees in her mansion, and she released many of her late father’s slaves from labor.

Mary Jane was one of these, and Elizabeth doted on her. Among the privileges she accorded the younger woman was a Northern education. She didn’t stop there. Elizabeth was forward-thinking and a little eccentric. She cooked up an elaborate, high-risk plan for Mary Jane to infiltrate the White House of the Confederacy as an enslaved woman and spy on Jefferson Davis. By some miracle—or rather, by virtue of the smarts and courage of these women—the plan worked.

“It’s one thing to read the facts of what they did,” said Zollar. “But when you experience it and understand what was on the line if either of them had been caught—” She paused, letting the image hover.

“It’s very powerful.”

As Zollar toured the White House of the Confederacy, she felt in her bones the perils Mary Jane must have encountered there, living undercover. She had to have been especially attuned to her body, what Zollar calls the “physical language” that Mary Jane needed to perfect as she code-switched and carried her body differently so she could slip by unnoticed, eavesdropping, stealing battle plans, and hiding her truth as an educated person.

That tension between truth and lies permeates Intelligence. The opera asks us to contemplate what is truth, and who gets to decide. Even at the outset of the project, Zollar had to confront these questions as she struggled with her own conceptions of truth and knowledge.

“I don’t know opera,” she acknowledged, and that caused her to hesitate before joining the Intelligence team.

It was a rare moment of doubt in a storied career. Zollar is an icon in the dance world. She’s a fearless artist-activist, the recipient of major awards including a 2021 MacArthur Foundation fellowship, and a leading voice of women’s empowerment. In 1984 she founded Urban Bush Women to blow up modern-dance conventions. With her choreographic style that is both forceful and fluid, Zollar established an all-female powerhouse, based in Brooklyn, to tell stories of racial injustice, the Black experience, and the life of women in America.

Inspired by the jazz scene she gravitated to in New York, Zollar built Urban Bush Women into a tight-knit ensemble company—a rarity at the time in the underfunded modern-dance sphere, where dancers are frequently hired short-term, on a “pickup company” basis.

“I wanted it to become a system, with many methodologies informing it,” Zollar said. She brought in actors and directors “who helped us understand, as dancers, what does it mean to tell a story in your body?”

She discovered that a stage actor’s focus—direct, involved, and intimate—feels more dramatic than the typical dancer’s focus, which is softer, veiled, generally aimed at a point over the audience’s head. Zollar also developed a technique of dancing that looks natural and improvised rather than meticulously rehearsed. Even though it is.

“It’s what I call living in the moment,” she said. “Cultivating the practice of being completely present so it feels like everything just happened in that moment, and the movement came out spontaneously.”

Movement and storytelling are Zollar’s bread and butter. But when Intelligence composer Jake Heggie, the acclaimed creator of such operas as Dead Man Walking and Moby-Dick, sent her an email asking her to team up with him and librettist Gene Scheer, Zollar sat on it for days.

Finally, she decided opera might not be such a stretch.

“I’m very musical,” Zollar said, “and I connect with music in a visual way. It’s also story, something I relate to on a physical level. And that’s in Jake’s music.

“I’d listen and think, ‘Oh, I’ll take this approach. I think this is a dance of foreboding,’” Zollar continued. “Because the music feels tentative, like a warning, with a delicate yet powerful sense of the spacing of sound. And I got ideas about creating bigger dances—dances of courage and hope, building some specificity.”

months of trying things out in a rehearsal studio, she mapped out the kinetic traces of the dangers and deceptions that run through Intelligence. The character of Mary Jane’s deceased mother, an enslaved woman who, absent historical records, the opera names Lucinda, took shape, as a guiding spirit with secrets of her own.

Lucinda introduces the notion of an ancestral realm into the opera, an all-knowing place beyond time. Eight dancers embody this realm; they form an individualized, dynamic chorus, and comment silently on the story through movement alone. Zollar calls them the “Is-Was-Will.”

“The past, present, and future live within their bodies,” Zollar said. “That allows me to think in a more poetic and narrative way about where they are in a scene, what the dance is about and how they’re moving.

“One of the concepts I brought forward is part of African cosmologies, that the past, present, and future always exist together,” she said. “So the people who are able to hold that knowledge are powerful. It gives you a very different way to think about time and what is known.”

What is known. Intelligence wrestles with this question, exploring the way knowledge and facts are defined, used, and misused. What does the word “intelligence” mean in the context of wartime espionage—and when the spies are women and enslaved people, all of them chronically, tragically underestimated and rendered invisible? The story is full of paradoxes, cryptic motives, and betrayals. This is rich fodder for the opera’s creators.

By that point, Zollar had dreamed herself into directing her first opera.

Her approach was exactly what Heggie wanted. The buried truths and mysteries of Intelligence call for an unorthodox opera, he said. Movement and dance are as essential to the storytelling as music and words.

“I wanted to think outside the box,” Heggie said. “I wanted this to be very special. I didn’t want someone ingrained in ‘this is how we do opera.’”

“I knew I wanted to incorporate movement into this piece because there were so many question marks, so much in the shadows,” he continued. “I felt movement and dance would be essential to tell the story because of all the unknowns. Because it goes beyond words.”

As work began on the opera, Zollar gathered some dancers from Urban Bush Women and, over many

“The main characters existed in their time, but we’re not looking at it from the 1800s. We’re looking at it now,” said Zollar. “I wasn’t interested in creating a straight reality of the Civil War.” Once they decided to incorporate ancestors, the story took on a quality of magic realism, she said.

“It’s the idea that there’s a magical world happening all around us, and at the same time we’re in this linear, historical world,” said Zollar. “Afrofuturism is another way to put it. It’s that there’s so much of the ‘knowing,’ and also the things we don’t know but suspect. There’s mystery.”

Sharing ideas like these with Zollar has been “lifechanging,” said Heggie. “She’s made me look at how I put things together differently. I’m thinking about not only having a dance company onstage almost all the time, but also about the singers and their movement. That took me by the throat and has led me through the whole process.”

Zollar at Houston rehearsals with Intelligence associate director Colter Schoenfish.

Credit: Lawrence Elizabeth Knox

He recalled the first time he watched her dancers rehearse back in 2021, when Heggie, Scheer, and Zollar were workshopping Colorado, Boulder. The dancing inspired him to rush off and write more music.

“I knew there would be an ancestral dance in Act Two,” he said. But he struggled to find the right sound for it, until Zollar told him, “’It just needs to sound said. “So it became primarily percussion alone. And I’ve never done that in opera before.

“It gives me shivers to think about,” he continued. “And that wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t been in the room with them. There was this specific move ment, where the dancers came in and raised a foot and hovered, and then put it down. Raise, hover, and down. It was this arc of energy, holding up—and then down to the earth. I was like, ‘Oh, my God, I have an idea!’”

Zollar is “an amazing life force,” said Khori Dastoor, HGO’s general director and CEO. “In many ways she’s been the primary creator for the work. This is a Black woman’s story, and she has been our North Star in how this story is expressed in this piece.”

Dastoor is excited to open with a world premiere. “I really feel that this is the story I want to tell about the Houston Grand Opera in this moment, to spark a conversation.”

“Here in the South,” she added, “understanding our history is an important part of how we get anything done. How are we here together? How did we get here? At a time when we’re reflecting on the framing that is being taught to our young people, it’s important to say, ‘This is an important story that you need to know.’”

For Zollar, giving voice, movement, and corporeality to courageous women nearly lost to the past has a particular urgency. As truth can vanish with terrifying ease.

“Intelligence said. “And you see how these histories are going to become even more obscured, and the way history is being erased. So it’s really important that these stories are told.”

Sarah L. Kaufman is a Pulitzer Prize-winning dance critic, formerly with the Washington Post . An author, educator, and journalist, she is working on her second book. SarahLKaufman.com

Photo credit: Ian Douglas

AN AMERICAN STORY

JAKE HEGGIE HAS LED A RENAISSANCE IN OPERA FOR THE LAST QUARTER-CENTURY.

By Patrick Summers, Artistic and Music Director

Jake Heggie and Gene Scheer's It's a Wonderful

made its

premiere at HGO in 2016. Photo credit: Karen Almond

There’s a memorably ironic moment in Great Scott, composer Jake Heggie’s 2015 opera with librettist Terrence McNally. Fictional, deceased Italian composer Vittorio Bazzetti, a hybrid of Bellini and Donizetti, is brought back to life during an intermission panic attack suffered by the title character, Arden Scott, who is riskily starring in Bazzetti’s long-forgotten masterpiece. She mentions that she is an American opera singer, and that she is shortly to premiere a new American opera.

“American opera?” Bazzetti sings, “I didn’t know there was such a thing!” Indeed, to nearly any 19th-century person, the words opera and America would rarely have appeared in the same sentence.

From its beginnings as a remnant of the Florentine and Venetian empires of the 17th century until the onset of World War I, opera indeed was a largely European art, even when imported to America. The early Metropolitan Opera seasons, beginning in the 1880s, would not have been out of place in any European capital, and the company maintained that image for a long time. San Francisco Opera was started by the Italian immigrant Gaetano Merola, and for most of its first half-century was very Eurocentric, employing its first American-born leadership only in the 21st century. Chicago was known as La Scala-west for decades.

Not Houston Grand Opera, which was enterprising from the start, opening in 1955 (the same year as Lyric Opera of Chicago) with two operas that were only 50 years old at that time, Madame Butterfly and Salome, starring largely American artists. Subsequent seasons in those early years saw a fair amount of American repertoire, as well.

From the early 1970s onward, this entrepreneurial mantle was expanded and taken on a huge joy ride by General Director David Gockley, from reconstructing the Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess and delivering it to its rightful place on operatic stages for the first time since

it was written for Broadway, to the largest and most diverse range of American repertoire of any opera house anywhere. This is an American vision of an art born in Europe that continued after David’s departure and lives on today in the company’s new general director and CEO, Khori Dastoor. Replenishing the repertoire with works of our own time is the finest way to honor the legacy repertoire of the past.

Like the fictional Bazzetti, it sometimes surprises people to learn that anyone is still writing operas at all in the 21st century. It seems like such an old-world activity, doesn’t it? Well, they are, and American composer Jake Heggie has led a renaissance in American opera for the last quarter-century. There have been many game-changing operas this century in a huge array of styles, but Jake has been the unbidden leader of this new movement of audience-embracing works, from his first opera, Dead Man Walking, which opened in October 2000 at San Francisco Opera. Before Dead Man Walking opened, David Gockley had determined that HGO should commission his next two full-length operas (how many companies have the vision to commission an opera from a composer before the first has opened!?). They were The End of the Affair, based on Graham Greene’s novel, followed by part one of the retirement of Frederica von Stade, who starred in Jake's popular opera Three Decembers.

Our northern colleagues at The Dallas Opera commissioned Jake’s next two full-length operas, Moby-Dick and Great Scott, after which he returned to Houston for his 6th large-scale commission, It’s a Wonderful Life, based on Frank Capra’s iconic film, and now this new commission from HGO, Intelligence. This means, obviously, that six of Jake’s seven major operas have been commissioned in Texas, which is a rare and precious bit of operatic history, something of which the state should be very proud.

Jake’s career has been capacious, rigorous, and incredibly broad. He has also been prolific, writing several smaller-scale operas and more than 300 songs to a

“ J AKE’S CAREER HAS BEEN CAPACIOUS, RIGOROUS, AND INCREDIBLY BROAD."

THE END OF THE AFFAIR , HOUSTON GRAND

OCTOBER

DEAD

JAKE HEGGIE WORLD PREMIERES THROUGH THE YEARS

INTELLIGENCE

MARCH

OCTOBER

2000 2004 2023

huge array of poets, many of which are staples of recit als. One of our unforgettable pandemic projects at HGO was his song cycle Songs for Murdered Sisters, poems by Margaret Atwood, conceived by Butler Studio alum Joshua Hopkins as a memorial to his late sister.

As Jake approached his sixties, a lot of impulses coalesced in him: musical, political, theatrical, social, philosophical. These aren’t musings that surface in daily conversation, but they pull on an artist, like birds knowing precisely when to migrate. Those impulses created the world into which Intelligence emerged, and it is a work that could only have come from a mature artist.

Pablo Picasso was once asked to autograph a napkin for a fan and while doing so, drew a small figure on it, giving the person a very-valuable Picasso sketch in the process. The fan commented with amazement on how quickly he had been able to produce something so valuable. Picasso responded with, “on the contrary; it has taken me my whole life.”

Intelligence is an opera that has taken a lifetime of rich and culminating experience to conceive and compose. Though it is certainly not Jake's final opera, it does represent an epiphanic turning point for him, as did Moby-Dick—nothing he wrote after it was the same as what came before. His extraordinary theatrical imagination places him, at age 62, as the inheritor of

the late Carlisle Floyd’s unofficial but deserved mantle as the Dean of the American Opera, a moniker Jake’s own natural modesty would probably refuse.

, an opera about the inherited truths of only one life, also aligns with several long-overdue cultural moments of racial reckoning in the United States, a movement that itself sits within complex societal realities about race in this country. No one opera, indeed, no single work of art of any kind, is ever going to do anything but chip away at the immensity and importance of this subject.

Intelligence will have a few detractors who will never see it, because these are the times in which we live. But as a summit of the mature part of Jake’s career, Intelligence is unquestionably the opera he was destined to write at this time (it was first conceived eight years ago), just as surely as he was destined to write his first opera, Dead Man Walking, a quartercentury ago We turned to him for a new opera because of the totality of his career and his status as an American composer, not because of any single subject.

Any successful writer or composer will be handed countless ideas by well-meaning admirers, and those ideas are always welcome and flattering, even when they are mostly terrible. But when a subject like this one burrows its way into the heart of a creator, nothing can stop it. The story was told to him by a docent at the

MAN WALKING , SAN FRANCISCO OPERA

HOUSTON GRAND OPERA

OPERA

Photo credits: Felix Sanchez, Karen Almond, Brett Coomer

DECEMBER

Smithsonian Institution, and I knew the moment he told me about it that nothing would deter him from it. We should all desire those works that are burning within the greatest creative minds, whether or not they are conventional.

The subject of Intelligence is complex and multilayered, as it is not “about” any single thing. The ultimate subject of all of Jake’s major operas has been, in various ways, identity: “Who am I,” in the face of an adversary? This took the form of a spiritual journey between two people in Dead Man Walking: Sister Helen Prejean finds herself amidst an unexpected juggernaut of death penalty politics in the American South, but the death penalty is not the opera’s subject. Sister Helen wants only one thing: that the murderer, Joseph de Rocher, accept responsibility for his crime, so that she can ease the pain of his soul, and the opera is about her journey to get him there.

Intelligence tells an American Civil War story, partly fictional and yet real at its most important points. Still, neither the Civil War nor slavery are the opera’s ultimate subject. Like all of Jake’s other operas, Intelligence is deeply about identity, but identity within the world of slavery, civil war, and the gathering of intelligence to win that war. Traumatic family secrets are a deeper part of the Intelligence story. It is an opera about where the truth of our lives can be found, and how corrosive deception always is.

OCTOBER

The aim of the opera is beneath its surface, where it tells a single American story of two very real American women, abolitionist Elizabeth and the enslaved Mary Jane, whose lives were intertwined in an era in which families were regularly ripped apart. This single story is magnified millions of times by untold and lost tales within the American diaspora. We all live, at some level, with the generational wounds of our country’s history. There is no escaping them without inflicting untenable amounts of future pain, so we must let our stories be told, however they are told. One story will open doors for future stories, as we have seen countless times.

Intelligence is a rich generational story, a deep call from America’s most renowned opera composer for unity, empathy, and the ignition of important conversations. It marks, also, the operatic debut of director/choreographer Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and her company, Urban Bush Women, whose role in co-creating and theatricalizing Gene Scheer’s dense and rigorous libretto cannot be overstated. `

Intelligence is a landmark in the history of HGO, the first American opera to open one of our seasons, and itself not only a new pinnacle of a composer’s alreadyillustrious career, but the launch of a new era of the company’s role in what is now a thoroughly American art: opera. Yes, Maestro Bazzetti from Great Scott, American opera is alive and thriving in a place you would never have heard of: Houston, Texas. ∎

THREE DECEMBERS , HOUSTON GRAND OPERA

GREAT SCOTT , DALLAS OPERA

IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE , HOUSTON GRAND OPERA

DONORS BRING ART TO ALL

Ticket sales cover less than 20% of the cost of producing great opera. Your contributions make up the rest. It’s donors like you who bring grand opera to families and students across Houston.

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For more information on benefits, visit HGO.org/DONATE. Please contact David Krohn, director of philanthropy, at 713-980-8685 or DKrohn@HGO.org.

2023-2024

PRODUCTION FUNDERS

FALL REP

PRINCIPAL GUARANTORS

Gordon Getty

Sara and Bill Morgan

John L. Nau, III

PREMIER GUARANTOR

The Wortham Foundation, Inc.

GRAND GUARANTORS

Carol Franc Buck Foundation

The Edgar Foster Daniels Foundation

Dede Wilsey

GRAND UNDERWRITERS

Nana Booker and M. David Lowe Booker · Lowe Gallery

Meg Boulware and Hartley Hampton/ Boulware & Valoir

Mr. Jay Hiemenz

Terrylin G. Neale

Franci Neely

Ms. Katherine Reynolds

Allyson Pritchett

GUARANTORS

Margaret Alkek Williams

Elizabeth and Richard Husseini

URBAN BUSH WOMEN FUNDING

Urban Bush Women 40th Anniversary leadership funding provided by Bloomberg Philanthropies.

Additional funding provided by the Howard Gilman Foundation.

UNDERWRITERS

Helen Berggruen

Kiana K. Caleb and Troy L. Sullivan

Sasha Davis

Dr. Elaine Decanio

Ron Franklin and Janet Gurwitch

Linda Hart

Brenda Harvey-Traylor

Marianne Kah

Michelle Klinger and Ruain Flanagan

Glen Rosenbaum

Helen Wils and Leonard Goldstein

Mary and David Wolf

SPONSORS

Pat and Jess Carnes

Michele and Laurence Corash

Jayne and Peter Davis

Bob Ellis

Charles Hanes

Bernice Lindstrom

Terri and Bob Ryan

This production of Intelligence received funding from OPERA America’s Opera Fund.

An Opera in Two Acts

CONTENT ADVISORY:

This opera contains depictions of slavery. It also contains gunshot effects.

Oct. 20, 22m, 28, 30†, Nov. 1, 3

BY

LIBRETTO BY Gene Scheer

DIRECTED/ CHOREOGRAPHED BY Jawole Willa Jo Zollar

Commissioned by Houston Grand Opera

World premiere production in collaboration with Urban Bush Women

Sung in English with projected English text

The performance lasts approximately 2 hours and 40 minutes, including one intermission.

The activities of Houston Grand Opera are supported in part by funds provided by the City of Houston through Houston Arts Alliance and by a grant from the Texas Commission on the Arts.

CONCEIVED

Jake Heggie, Gene Scheer, and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar

MUSIC BY Jake Heggie

QUICK START GUIDE

THE OPERA IN ONE SENTENCE

When the enslaved Mary Jane Bowser goes undercover at the Confederate White House to spy for the Union, she discovers even more secrets about her own life and family.

BACKGROUND

In 2012, author and educator Lois Leveen wrote an op-ed for the New York Times titled “A Black Spy in the Confederate White House,” introducing much of the public, for the first time, to the extraordinary true story of Mary Jane Bowser. Born into slavery to the Van Lew family circa 1840, Mary Jane had an unusual series of events in her life: she was baptized and married in Richmond’s white church, sent to the north to be fully educated in reading and writing, and sent to Liberia as a missionary. When she returned to Richmond, she was loaned out to the Confederate White House where her unexpected literacy allowed her to spy on documentation of troop movements and strategy, which she was able to deliver to the North through Elizabeth Van Lew’s undercover spy ring. Leveen’s article was given to composer Jake Heggie by a docent at the Smithsonian Institution, and the idea for his next opera, Intelligence, was born. With longtime collaborator Gene Scheer on board as librettist, Heggie reached out to director and choreographer Jawole Willa Jo Zollar to complete the creative team. Created in collaboration with Urban Bush Women, the dance company founded by Zollar in 1984, Intelligence tells the story of Mary Jane and Elizabeth through a unique fusion of words, dance, and music, an unprecedented combination on the operatic stage in which all three art forms coalesce into a narrative whole.

WHAT TO LISTEN FOR

Intelligence opens with Mary Jane at a clothesline, singing a minor-mode melody that bends through flat- and natural-scale degrees, evoking a bluesy,

plaintive atmosphere as she sings, “Oh, Lord, have mercy on my soul.” This folklike theme returns in a short duet with Lucinda shortly after they meet, as Mary Jane is unaware that Lucinda is the spirit of her mother, and unaware of the deeper meaning behind the diegetic lyrics, “Whose arms were holding me then? Whose arms would not let me go?” The haunting refrain comes back in Lucinda’s voice throughout the opera, notably in the ultimate scene when Mary Jane finally learns the truth about her past from Elizabeth.

SEVEN NAMES

Mary Jane Bowser is so named, in Intelligence, for the historical record indicating that she married Wilson Bowser, a man also enslaved to the Van Lew family. Primary sources do not indicate that Mary Jane ever took the last name Bowser. She is most commonly called Mary Jane Richards, taken from her baptismal records, but her transient life through the unwelcoming South after the Civil War forced her to go by many different names. She had become a teacher for the Freedmen’s Bureau, taking her through schools and communities in Virginia, Georgia, and Florida, and giving lectures in Texas and New York. For a number of reasons, including protecting her identity from unfriendly listeners as she recounted her wartime efforts, Mary Jane went by at least seven different known aliases: Mary Jane Richards, Mary Elizabeth Bowser, Mary J. Garvin, Mrs. John T. Denman, M.J. Denman, Richmonia Richards, and Richmonia R. St. Pierre.

CAST & CREATIVE

CAST (in order of vocal appearance)

Mary Jane Bowser Janai Brugger *

Lucinda J'Nai Bridges *

Travis Briggs Michael Mayes

Elizabeth Van Lew Jamie Barton ‡

Callie Van Lew Caitlin Lynch ‡

Henry Nicholas Newton ‡

Wilson Joshua Blue *

URBAN BUSH WOMEN DANCERS

Courtney J. Cook *

Loren Davidson *

Kentoria Earle *

Roobi Gaskins *

Symara Johnson *

Bianca Leticia Medina *

Love Muwwakkil *

Mikaila Ware *

CREATIVE TEAM

Composer

Librettist

Conductor

Director/Choreographer

Jake Heggie

Gene Scheer

Kwamé Ryan *

Jawole Willa Jo Zollar *

Set Designer Mimi Lien *

Original Costume Designer

Carlos Soto *

Costume Realizer and Clair Hummel *

Designer of Dancer Costumes

Lighting Designer

Projection Designer

Co-Designer of Projections

Associate Director

Associate Choreographer

Fight Director

Intimacy Director

Sound Effects Designer

Dramaturg

English Diction Coach

Musical Preparation

CREATIVE CREDIT

Ann Owens, Commissioning Consultant

PRODUCTION CREDITS

Stage Manager

John Torres

Wendall K. Harrington

Rasean Davonté Johnson *

Colter Schoenfish

Vincent Thomas *

Luke Fedell

Skye Bronfenbrenner *

Eduardo Hawkins

Jeremy Johnson

Jim Johnson

Kirill Kuzmin ‡

Michelle Papenfuss †

Dr. Saúl and Ursula Balagura/ Sharon Ley Lietzow and Robert Lietzow/ Dr. Laura E. Sulak and Dr. Richard W. Brown Fellow

Peter Pasztor ‡

Marco Rizzello *†

Ms. Lynn Des Prez/ Dr. Gary L. Hollingsworth and Dr. Ken Hyde/ Stephanie Larsen / Dr. and Mrs. Miguel Miro-Quesada Fellow

Annie Wheeler

* Mainstage debut † Butler Studio artist ‡ Former Butler Studio artist

English supertitles by Wesley Landry. Supertitles called by Matthew Neumann. Performing artists, stage directors, and choreographers are represented by the American Guild of Musical Artists, AFL-CIO, the union for opera professionals in the United States.

Scenic, costume, and lighting designers and assistant designers are represented by United Scenic Artists, IATSE Local USA-829. Orchestral musicians are represented by the Houston Professional Musicians Association, Local #65-699, American Federation of Musicians. Stage crew personnel provided by IATSE, Local #51. Wardrobe personnel provided by Theatrical Wardrobe Union, Local #896. This production is being recorded for archival purposes.

SYNOPSIS

Richmond, 1865. The U.S. Civil War.

ACT I

Mary Jane Bowser, a woman born into slavery to the wealthy Van Lew family in Richmond, is hanging laundry on the Van Lew plantation when she is approached by a woman named Lucinda, whom she has never met but who seems to know a lot about Mary Jane. Lucinda questions Mary Jane’s close relationship with Elizabeth Van Lew, the daughter of the deceased family patriarch. Mary Jane defends Elizabeth, saying she took care of her after her mother died in childbirth. We learn that Mary Jane had been baptized and married in Richmond’s church for white families, and that she was sent to the North for school to learn to read and write.

As Lucinda slips away, a man runs to Mary Jane begging for help to escape to the North. Elizabeth enters and berates him for implying that she is sympathetic to the Union. She also recognizes the man: she knows he is Travis Briggs, a Confederate Home Guard, who was trying to entrap Elizabeth and Mary Jane. Elizabeth’s sister-in-law Callie arrives and vouches for Elizabeth’s loyalty to the Confederacy. She, too, is suspicious of Elizabeth’s Northern sympathies, but she is more concerned with protecting her family name.

When Travis and Callie depart, Elizabeth and Mary Jane drop the charade and focus on the task at hand: they have two Union soldiers hiding in the house, and they need Mary Jane’s husband Wilson to help them escape to the North. Elizabeth then tells Mary Jane that their secret plan can finally be put into motion: Mary Jane will be loaned out to the Confederate White House. She will spy for the Union, sending intelligence from Jefferson Davis’s study to the North through Elizabeth’s spy ring.

At the seamstress shop, Mary Jane delivers a dress with Confederate secrets sewn into the hem. Travis approaches her, increasingly suspicious of her and Elizabeth; he nearly assaults her before he is interrupted by the Davises' butler, Henry, who is looking for Mary Jane to bring her back to the Davis house.

Wilson tells Elizabeth that, as he was delivering the message from the dress to the Union line, he learned that only one of the two Union soldiers made it back safely; the Confederate Home Guard must have captured one of the escaped Yankee prisoners. As Elizabeth worries about the captured soldier and about Callie and Travis’s increasing suspicions, she asks Wilson to bury her journal: they cannot risk anyone finding the cipher to their messages to the Union.

Travis interrogates the captured Yankee but kills him when nothing is revealed. Lucinda mysteriously reappears, observing both the burying of the soldier and the burying of the journal. At the Davis house, Mary Jane has uncovered intelligence that needs to

get to the North as quickly as possible: she does not have time to sew it into a dress to deliver later. She sets fire to the building as a distraction, encouraging Henry to run to the Van Lew house where Elizabeth can help him get to the North. As the fire grows, Mary Jane sees Lucinda consumed in the flames.

INTERMISSION ACT II

Mary Jane returns to the room where she started the fire, looking for signs of Lucinda: nobody else saw Lucinda in the fire. Back at the Van Lew house, Callie tries yet again to entrap Elizabeth. She pretends to be more concerned about her family’s welfare in the war, asking Elizabeth to help them escape to the North. Elizabeth refuses to take the bait.

Elizabeth meets Mary Jane at the seamstress shop, thinking Mary Jane has found some new intelligence. Instead, Mary Jane asks about Lucinda. Insisting that no one was in the fire, Elizabeth reluctantly asks the troubled Mary Jane for more help: since Callie has been suspiciously watching her, Elizabeth needs Mary Jane to retrieve the buried journal. Mary Jane agrees, but then asks about her mother: what was her name? How old was she when she died?

When Elizabeth leaves, Mary Jane falls into a mysterious existence as spirits and ancestors dance around her. She sees Lucinda. Mary Jane asks her how old she was when she died, and Lucinda echoes Elizabeth’s answer about Mary Jane’s mother.

Travis finds Wilson digging up the buried journal and knocks him unconscious. When Mary Jane arrives, Travis confronts her about the secrets, stories, and cipher: he reads a story from Elizabeth’s journal that departs from Mary Jane’s knowledge of her mother’s death in childbirth, instead saying that Mary Jane was two years old when the Van Lews took her mother to the auction block. As Travis moves to assault Mary Jane, Henry appears, and the men fight; Travis is killed.

Callie comes across Travis’s body. She plans to turn Elizabeth in and destroy her family name. Elizabeth watches from a distance, a gun in hand, prepared to do the worst to protect herself and the spy ring. But as Callie realizes that destroying Elizabeth’s reputation would include her and her children, she focuses on her own selfpreservation: Callie buries Travis’s body herself to keep the truth from being discovered.

Elizabeth tells Mary Jane what she saw Callie do. But Mary Jane is no longer concerned with the secrets of the war and the spy ring. She is concerned with the secrets Elizabeth has been keeping from her. As she confronts Elizabeth and learns the truth about what happened to her mother, Mary Jane decides to leave Richmond behind her and tell her story. The whole story.

HGO ORCHESTRA

Patrick Summers, Artistic and Music Director

Sarah and Ernest Butler Chair

Eun Sun Kim, Principal Guest Conductor

VIOLIN

Denise Tarrant*, Concertmaster

Sarah and Ernest Butler Concertmaster Chair

Chloe Kim*, Assistant Concertmaster

Natalie Gaynor*, Principal Second Violin

Carrie Kauk*, Assistant Principal Second Violin

Miriam Belyatsky*

Anabel Ramirez-Detrick*

Rasa Kalesnykaite†

Hae-a Lee Barnes*

Chavdar Parashkevov*

Mary Reed*

Erica Robinson*

Linda Sanders*

Oleg Sulyga*

Sylvia VerMeulen*

Melissa Williams*

Zubaida Azezi

Andres Gonzalez

Kana Kimura

Emily Madonia

Mila Neal

Jacob Schafer

Rachel Shepard

Hannah Watson

VIOLA

Eliseo Rene Salazar*, Principal

Lorento Golofeev*, Assistant Principal

Gayle Garcia-Shepard*

Erika C. Lawson*

Suzanne LeFevre*

Dawson White†

Sarah Mason

Matthew Weathers

Sergein Yap

CELLO

Barrett Sills*, Principal

Erika Johnson*, Assistant Principal

Ariana Nelson†

Wendy Smith-Butler*

Steven Wiggs†

David Dietz

Shino Hayashi

Kristiana Ignatjeva

DOUBLE BASS

Dennis Whittaker*, Principal

Erik Gronfor*, Assistant Principal

Carla Clark*

Hunter Capoccioni

FLUTE

Henry Williford*, Principal

Tyler Martin*

OBOE

Elizabeth Priestly Siffert*, Principal

Mayu Isom*

CLARINET

Sean Krissman†, Principal

Rebecca Tobin, Acting Principal

Eric Chi†

Justin Best

BASSOON

Amanda Swain*, Principal

Michael Allard†

Micah Doherty

HORN

Sarah Cranston*, Principal

Kimberly Penrod Minson*

Spencer Park†

TRUMPET

Tetsuya Lawson*, Principal

Randal Adams*

TROMBONE

Thomas Hultén*, Principal

Mark Holley†

Justin Bain†

Ben Osborne

TUBA

Mark Barton†, Principal

TIMPANI

Alison Chang*, Principal

PERCUSSION

Richard Brown*, Principal

Christina Carroll

Craig Hauschildt

Karen Slotter

PIANO

Kirill Kuzmin

ORCHESTRA PERSONNEL MANAGER

Richard Brown*

* HGO Orchestra core musician

† HGO Orchestra core musician on leave this production

SUPERNUMERARIES

Fritz Eagleton

Jon L. Egging

Will Larsen

Jonathan Robinson

WHO'S WHO

JAKE HEGGIE (UNITED STATES) COMPOSER

Jake Heggie is the American composer of the acclaimed operas Dead Man Walking, Moby-Dick, It’s A Wonderful Life, and Three Decembers, among others. Heggie’s operas —most created with Gene Scheer or the late Terrence McNally—and his nearly 300 art songs, as well as chamber, choral, and orchestral works, have been performed extensively on five continents, championed by some of the world’s most beloved artists. Several of his works made their world premieres at HGO: End of the Affair (2004), Three Decembers (2008), Pieces of 9/11 (2011), It’s a Wonderful Life (2016), and Songs for Murdered Sisters (2022). HGO performed Dead Man Walking in 2011, with a commercial recording being released on the Virgin Classics label. The work has now received nearly 80 international productions, making it the most-performed American opera of our time. New York’s Metropolitan Opera opens its 2023-24 season with Dead Man Walking in a bold new production by director Ivo van Hove, conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin. Starting this September, Heggie’s “Fire” (Elements) will tour around the world in a co-commissioned project with Joshua Bell and orchestras including the NDR Elbphilharmonie, New York Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and Seattle Symphony. Future premieres include new works for the Miró String Quartet and a one-act opera, Before it All Goes Dark (Scheer), starring bassbaritone Ryan McKinny and mezzo-soprano Megan Marino. Heggie has received Grammy nominations for Great Scott (2019) as well as Unexpected Shadows, his album with Jamie Barton (2022). A Guggenheim Fellow, Heggie has served as a mentor for the Washington National Opera’s American Opera Initiative and is a frequent guest artist at universities, conservatories, and festivals throughout the U.S. and Canada.

GENE SCHEER (UNITED STATES) LIBRETTIST

Gene Scheer is a frequent collaborator with composer Jake Heggie, with three of their works making their world premieres at HGO: It’s a Wonderful Life (2016), Three Decembers, which starred Frederica von Stade (2008); and the song cycle Pieces of 9/11 (2011). The two also collaborated on the critically acclaimed 2010 Dallas Opera world premiere Moby-Dick, starring Ben Heppner as Captain Ahab; the lyric drama To Hell and Back (Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra), which featured Patti LuPone; and Camille Claudel: Into the Fire, a song cycle premiered by Joyce DiDonato and the Alexander String Quartet. Scheer worked as librettist with Tobias Picker on An American Tragedy, which premiered at the Metropolitan Opera in 2005. Their first opera, Therese Raquin, written for the Dallas Opera in 2001, was cited by Opera News as one of the ten best recordings of 2002. Other collaborations include the lyrics for Wynton Marsalis’s “It Never Goes Away,” featured in Congo

Square; the Grammy-nominated oratorio August 4, 1964, with composer Steven Stucky; the opera Everest with composer Joby Talbot, premiered by the Dallas Opera in 2015; and the opera Cold Mountain with composer Jennifer Higdon, premiered by the Santa Fe Opera in 2015 (International Opera Award for Best World Premiere in 2015). Also a composer, Scheer has written a number of songs for singers such as Renée Fleming, Sylvia McNair, Stephanie Blythe, Jennifer Larmore, Denyce Graves, and Nathan Gunn. Scheer’s song “American Anthem,” sung by Norah Jones, was featured in Ken Burns’s Emmy Award-winning documentary The War

KWAMÉ RYAN (CANADA/ TRINIDAD) CONDUCTOR

Kwamé Ryan is making his HGO debut. Recent and upcoming engagements have taken him to the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, Netherlands Opera, the Hamburg Symphony, the Charlotte Symphony, the Stavanger Symphony Orchestra, and the BBC Philharmonic. Work in the U.S and the U.K. has taken him to the symphony orchestras of Baltimore, Dallas, Detroit, Indianapolis, Atlanta, Houston, Boston Lyric Opera, English National Opera, Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Royal Scottish Symphony, and the London Philharmonia. He has been a regular guest of the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra and most recently returned to La Monnaie, Brussels for the world premiere of Kris De Foort’s The Time of our Singing, which won the International Opera Award as World Premiere of 2021. Ryan is the previous General Music Director of Freiburg Opera and Musical and Artistic Director of the National Orchestra of Bordeaux Aquitaine. As a guest conductor in Germany, he has conducted the Radio Orchestras of Stuttgart and Bavaria, the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie, Konzerthausorchester Berlin, Staatsoper Saarbrücken, and Staatsoper Stuttgart; while in France, he has worked at Opera de la Bastille, Opera de Lyon and the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France. A recipient of international awards for outstanding work in the field of music education, Ryan has served as Musical Director of the National Youth Orchestra of France and as Director of the Academy for the Performing Arts at the University of Trinidad and Tobago.

JAWOLE WILLA JO ZOLLAR (UNITED STATES)

DIRECTOR/CHOREOGRAPHER

Jawole Willa Jo Zollar is making her HGO debut. In 1984, Zollar founded Urban Bush Women as a performance ensemble dedicated to exploring the use of cultural expression as a catalyst for social change. Her most recent honors include the 2022 APAP Honors Award of Merit for Achievement in the Performing Arts, the 2022 Dorothy and Lilian Gish Prize, and a 2021 fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur

Foundation. In addition to 34 works for UBW, she has created works for Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Philadanco, University of Maryland, Virginia Commonwealth University, and others. UBW has toured five continents and has performed at venues including Brooklyn Academy of Music, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, and The Kennedy Center, and in 2010 was selected as one of three U.S. dance companies to inaugurate a cultural diplomacy program for the U.S. Department of State. Zollar serves as director of the Urban Bush Women Summer Leadership Institute, which enables artists to strengthen effective involvement in cultural organizing and civic engagement. A former board member of Dance/USA, Zollar received a 2008 United States Artists Wynn fellowship and a 2009 fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial. She received the 2013 Arthur L. Johnson Memorial Award, the 2013 Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, the 2015 Dance Magazine Award, the 2016 Dance/USA Honor Award, the 2017 Bessies Lifetime Achievement Award, the 2021 Dance Teacher Award of Distinction, and the 2021 Martha Hill Dance Fund Lifetime Achievement Award. She holds honorary degrees from Columbia College, Chicago, Tufts University, Rutgers University, and the Muhlenberg College. She is the Nancy Smith Fichter Professor of Dance and Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor at Florida State University.

MIMI LIEN (UNITED STATES) SET DESIGNER

Mimi Lien is making her HGO debut. She is a designer of sets/environments for theater, dance, and opera. In 2015, she was named a MacArthur Fellow, the first set designer to achieve this distinction. Selected work includes Sweeney Todd (Broadway), Natasha, Pierre, & The Great Comet of 1812 (Broadway, Tony Award, Lortel Award, 2013 Hewes Design Award), John (Signature Theatre, 2016 Hewes Design Award), Appropriate (Mark Taper Forum, LA Drama Critics Circle Award), Preludes, The Oldest Boy (Lincoln Center), An Octoroon (Soho Rep/TFANA, Drama Desk, and Lortel nominations), and Black Mountain Songs (BAM Next Wave). Her stage designs have been exhibited in the Prague Quadrennial in 2011 and 2015, and her sculptures were featured in the exhibition Landscapes of Quarantine at the Storefront for Art and Architecture. Her designs for theater, dance, and opera have been seen around the U.S. at such venues as Lincoln Center Theater, Signature Theatre, Playwright’s Horizons, the Public Theater, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, The Joyce Theater, Goodman Theatre, Soho Rep, and internationally at Perm Opera and Ballet Theatre (Russia), Intradans (Netherlands), National Theatre (Taiwan), and many others. She is an artist-in-residence at Lincoln Center and Park Avenue Armory, and co-founder of the Brooklyn performance space JACK.

CARLOS J. SOTO (UNITED STATES) COSTUME DESIGNER

Director, designer, and performer Carlos J. Soto is making his HGO debut. His projects

include designing sets and costumes for Davóne Tines and Michael Schachter’s The Black Clown at the American Repertory Theater; designing costumes for Sulayman al Bassam’s The Petrol Station at the Kennedy Center; and designing costumes for a touring retrospective of Lucinda Childs’s works spanning dances from 1967 to today. He has worked with Robert Wilson as a performer and designer on numerous productions since 1997, in both the U.S. and Europe, including redesigning the costumes for the revival of Wilson’s and Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach; designing costumes for Adam’s Passion, a collaboration with Wilson and Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, in Tallinn, Estonia; and designing costumes for Wilson’s staging of Oedipus with German actress Angela Winkler and composer and saxophonist Richard Landry, staged among the ruins of Pompeii in the Teatro Grande, with subsequent tours to Palladio’s Teatro Olimpico, Vicenza, Naples’s Teatro Mercadante, and the Epidaurus Festival. He has collaborated with Solange Knowles as associate director and costume designer on multiple projects. He has been artist-in-residence at The Watermill Center, Kampnagel Hamburg, Schauspielhaus Wien, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and New York Live Arts, among others.

CLAIR HUMMEL (UNITED STATES)  COSTUME REALIZER AND DESIGNER OF DANCER COSTUMES

Clair Hummel is an Indiana-grown, Houstonbased costume designer and stylist. She is the costume shop supervisor and lecturer at Kinder High School for the Performing and Visual Arts. She served as costume realizer for 2023 HGO world premiere Another City. She spent six seasons as costume coordinator for HGO, during which she designed numerous productions including Memory Stone, Das Barbecü, and Monkey and Francine & The Lost City of Tigers. Other design credits include Stages Repertory Theatre (You’re Cordially Invited to Sit-In), Rec Room Arts (The Royale; Garbage Island; Hansel & Gretel ), Alley Theatre (OSKAR; All New Festival), Crossroads Repertory Theatre (Woman in Black ; Crimes of the Heart; Frankenstein), Classical Theatre Company (Candida), Houston Shakespeare Festival (Hamlet; Comedy of Errors), Rice University, Horse Head Theatre Co, The Landing Theatre Company, Mildred’s Umbrella Theater Company, Jhon Stronks (there…in the sunlight), and Angelight Films. She attended Indiana State University and earned her MFA from the University of Houston.

JOHN TORRES (UNITED STATES) LIGHTING DESIGNER

John Torres served as co-lighting designer for HGO’s Turandot in 2022. He has designed for theater, opera, live television, dance, music, and art exhibitions. Recent engagements include Turandot at Opera National de Paris and Tristan and Isolde at Santa Fe Opera. Torres has designed lighting for operas Tristan and Isolde (La Monnaie, Brussels), Atlas (Los Angeles Philharmonic), The Mile Long

Opera (High Line), Idomeneo (Opera Orchestre National Montpellier), and La traviata (State Theater of Linz), and for theater works including Twelfth Night and A Bright Room Called Day (The Public Theatre, New York), The Black Clown (American Repertory Theater), and Hamlet (St. Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn). He has collaborated with stage designer and director Robert Wilson, choreographers Lucinda Childs and Trisha Brown, and directors Yuval Sharon and Zack Winokur. He is a frequent collaborator with Solange Knowles and recently designed the residency for Usher at the Coliseum in Las Vegas.

WENDALL K. HARRINGTON (UNITED STATES)

PROJECTION DESIGNER

Wendall K. Harrington’s career has embraced projection design for theater, publishing, and video production. Her work has been seen at HGO in The Abduction from the Seraglio (2017, 2008), Nixon in China (2017), and The Juniper Tree (1986). Her opera credits include Werther at the Metropolitan Opera; Julie Taymor’s The Magic Flute in Florence, Italy; A View from the Bridge at Lyric Opera of Chicago; Die Gezeichneten at Los Angeles Opera; The Photographer at the Brooklyn Academy of Music; Brundibar for Opera Theatre of St. Louis and Palm Beach Opera; and Transatlantic, The Grapes of Wrath, and Rusalka for Minnesota Opera. Her Broadway credits include Paradise Square, Driving Miss Daisy, Gray Gardens, They’re Playing Our Song, My One and Only, The Heidi Chronicles, The Will Rogers Follies, Having Our Say, Company, Ragtime, The Capeman, and The Who’s Tommy. She has received the Drama Desk Award, the Outer Critics Circle Award, the American Theatre Wing Award, the TCI Award for Technical Achievement, the Obie Award for sustained excellence in projection design, the Michael Merritt Award for collaboration, the Ruth Morely Design Award for women in design, and a Lifetime Recognition Award from the Knights of Illumination. She is head of the projection design concentration at the Yale School of Drama.

RASEAN DAVONTÉ JOHNSON (UNITED STATES) CO-DESIGNER OF PROJECTIONS

Rasean Davonté Johnson is making his HGO debut. He is a video artist and designer of projections, scenery, and sound for theater, film, and installations. His theater work includes collaborations with numerous institutions, including Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Manual Cinema, Chicago Opera Theatre, Chicago Shakespeare Theatre, Goodman Theatre, Lookingglass Theatre Company, Court Theatre, Berkshire Theatre Group, MASSMoCA, ArtsEmerson, Huntington Theatre, Yale Repertory Theatre, Yale Opera, Yale Cabaret, Yale Summer Cabaret, Long Wharf Theatre, Hartford Stage, The McCarter Theatre Center, Everyman Theatre, The Studio Theatre, Woolly Mammoth Theatre, Alliance Theatre, The Ningbo Song and Dance Company, Teatro Vista, Timeline Theatre Company, The Hypocrites, Porchlight Music

Theatre, Halcyon Theatre, Redtwist Theatre, and many more. Based in Chicago, his practice eightinfinitystudio specializes in design, video engineering, consultation, and content creation for the performing arts. He received his Master of Fine Arts degree in design from the Yale School of Drama and has lectured at Yale University, Columbia College Chicago, Syracuse University, Boston University, The Theatre School at Depaul, and the Ohio State University.

COLTER SCHOENFISH (UNITED STATES) ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR

Previously for HGO, Colter Schoenfish (they/them) served as assistant director for Turandot (2022), The Marriage of Figaro (2023), and Salome (2023). Select directing credits include Cendrillon and The Tender Land with Chicago Summer Opera; Mozart and Salieri with Opera Saratoga; Orpheus and Euridice with Arbor Opera Theatre; and two world-premiere productions for the University of Michigan, Higher Ground and Enchantress. Schoenfish has collaborated as an assistant or associate director with renowned artists such as Robert Wilson, Lileana Blain-Cruz, David Alden, Francisco Negrin, Matthew Ozawa, and James Robinson. As a sought-after freelance artist, they have frequented companies across the country including Santa Fe Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, Detroit Opera, and Utah Opera. Upcoming work includes a return to HGO for Parsifal and a collaboration with Yuval Sharon on The Cunning Little Vixen for Detroit Opera. Schoenfish is a proud alumnus of the Theatre Directing program at the University of Michigan.

VINCENT E. THOMAS (UNITED STATES) ASSOCIATE CHOREOGRAPHER

Vincent Thomas is making his HGO debut. He is an award-winning dancer, choreographer, and educator. He is an Urban Bush Women BOLD (Builders, Organizers, & Leaders through Dance) Facilitator, a faculty member for the UBW Summer Institutes, a Professor of Dance at Towson University in Maryland, and the founder of multi-dimensional company VTDance. His choreography has been presented at various national and international destinations including DUMBO Festival; Philly Fringe; Edinburgh Fringe Festival; Barcelona and Madrid, Spain; Avignon, France; Athens, Greece; Bari, Italy; Copenhagen; Taipei; and Singapore. He received rave reviews for his performance of Come Change (2012) and iWitness (2014) in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland. Thomas was the movement coach/choreographer for Everyman Theater’s Brother’s Size by Tarell Alvin McCraney and Los Otros by Ellen Fitzhugh, and Mosaic Theatre’s Unexplored Interior by Jay Sander. He has danced with Florida State University’s Dance Repertory Theatre, Randy James Dance Works (New York/New Jersey), EDGEWORKS Dance Theater (Washington, D.C.), and Liz Lerman Dance Exchange (Maryland). He is the artistic director/choreographer of the national

touring What’s Going On project. He was awarded the 2017 Pola Nirenska Award for Outstanding Achievement in Dance, the 2019 University System of Maryland Regents Faculty Award for Excellence in Research, Scholarship & Creative Activity, the 2020 MDEA Living Legacy Award, and the 2021 Baker Artist Award. He was a 2022 Baker Award Finalist, and a Black History Month Honoree for South Carolina’s Richland District Two.

LUKE FEDELL (UNITED STATES) FIGHT DIRECTOR

Previously for HGO, Luke Fedell served as fight director for Prince of Players and Faust (2016), as well as La favorite (2020). This season for HGO, he also serves as fight director for Falstaff. Fedell is a working theater practitioner in the Houston area who has performed and staged violence in theater around the country, including New York City, and abroad in Taiwan and Scotland. A Certified Advanced Actor Combatant with the Society of American Fight Directors, he regularly performs and directs for theaters across the Houston area in addition to HGO, including the Alley Theatre, Stages, Rec Room, Mildred’s Umbrella, Catastrophic Theatre, and Classical Theatre Company. Fedell is a Professor of Theatre and Acting at the University of Houston – Downtown and serves as the Director of The O’Kane Theatre at the University.

SKYE BRONFENBRENNER (UNITED STATES) INTIMACY DIRECTOR

Previously for HGO, Skye Bronfenbrenner served as intimacy and fight director for La traviata at Miller Outdoor Theatre (spring 2023). This season, she also serves as intimacy director for Falstaff. Bronfenbrenner teaches BFA Movement for the Actor at the University of Houston’s School of Theatre and Dance. She has taught Movement and Stage Combat at Rice University and Kinder High School for the Visual and Performing Arts, as well as Movement/Combat for HGO’s Young Artist’s Vocal Academy. Her fight and intimacy work has been seen at Catastrophic Theatre, Rec Room Arts, Thunderclap Productions, Rice (Dept. of Visual and Dramatic Arts, Shepherd School of Music/ Opera), and UH (School for Theatre and Dance, Moores School of Music). She graduated with a Master of Fine Arts degree in Acting from the Professional Actor Training Program at UH and has performed at Stages and the Houston Shakespeare Festival, as well as the national tours of Beauty and the Beast and Guys and Dolls, and the international tour of Shrek the Musical

JAMIE BARTON (UNITED STATES) MEZZO-SOPRANO— ELIZABETH VAN LEW

Butler Studio alumna Jamie Barton appears regularly at HGO, including as Leonor de Guzman in La favorite (2020) and

Adalgisa in Norma (2018), as well as Waltraute/Second Norn in Götterdämmerung (2017), and Fricka in Das Rheingold (2014) and Die Walküre (2015), all part of Wagner’s Ring cycle. The 2023-24 season includes appearances as Amneris in Aida with Lyric Opera of Chicago, Mahler’s 8th Symphony with the Orchestre de Paris, and Gurre-Lieder with Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. In addition to role debuts as Orfeo in Orfeo ed Euridice and Mère Marie in Dialogues of the Carmelites at the Metropolitan Opera, Barton has recently performed as Leonor at Teatro Real Madrid; Adalgisa with the Met, Los Angeles Opera, and San Francisco Opera; Fricka and Waltraute at the Met, San Francisco Opera, and Washington National Opera; Azucena (Il trovatore) at Lyric Opera of Chicago, Bavarian State Opera, and Cincinnati Opera; Princess Eboli (Don Carlo) at Washington National Opera, Deutsche Oper Berlin, and the Met; Brangäne (Tristan und Isolde) at Festival d’Aixen-Provence, Bavarian State Opera, and Santa Fe Opera; Jezibaba (Rusalka) at San Francisco Opera and the Met; the title role in a queer Carmen at Chicago Opera Theater; and Sister Helen Prejean (Dead Man Walking) at her hometown opera company, Atlanta Opera. Barton’s debut solo album, All Who Wander, received the 2018 BBC Music Magazine Vocal Award. Unexpected Shadows, her critically acclaimed album with Jake Heggie, was nominated for a 2022 Grammy Award for Best Classical Solo Vocal Album.

JANAI BRUGGER (UNITED STATES) SOPRANO—MARY JANE BOWSER

Janai Brugger is making her HGO debut. Her other engagements this season include Pamina in The Magic Flute at the Metropolitan Opera. Brugger’s recent engagements include the role of Glauce in Cherubini’s Medea at the Metropolitan Opera, Susanna in The Marriage of Figaro at Los Angeles Opera, Liù in Turandot at Opera Colorado, her role debut in the title role of Carlisle Floyd’s Susannah at Opera Theatre of St. Louis, and Zerlina in Don Giovanni with the Tanglewood Festival and the Ravinia Festival. She recently sang Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with Munich Philharmonic, Poulenc’s Gloria with Bozeman Symphony Orchestra, and Mahler’s Second Symphony under the baton of Jader Bignamini with Detroit Symphony Orchestra. Her many appearances at the Metropolitan Opera include her house debut as Liù in Turandot, Jemmy in a new production of Guillaume Tell, Micaëla in Carmen, Helena in The Enchanted Island, Pamina in The Magic Flute, Marzelline in Fidelio, and Clara in Porgy and Bess In 2012 Brugger won the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions, as well as all three First Prizes at Operalia—the Opera Prize, the Song Prize, and the Audience Prize. She participated in the Merola Opera Program at San Francisco Opera and was a young artist at Los Angeles Opera for two seasons.

J’NAI BRIDGES (UNITED STATES) MEZZO-SOPRANO—LUCINDA

J’Nai Bridges, making her HGO mainstage debut, has graced the world’s top opera and concert stages. Other engagements during the 2023-24 season include performing the

role of Carmen in debuts at Teatro Lirico di Cagliari and Hamburg State Opera; making her debut at New York Philharmonic performing Julia Perry’s Stabat mater ; performing as a soloist in the Metropolitan Opera’s El Niño; and making her debut at Boston Symphony Orchestra in Berlioz’s Romeo and Juliet. During her 2022-23 season, she performed the title role in Carmen with debut engagements at the Arena di Verona and Canadian Opera Company, and return engagements to Dutch National Opera and Lyric Opera of Chicago. Her 2021-22 season highlights included numerous world-premiere engagements as a guest artist in The Kennedy Center’s 50th Anniversary Season. She appeared in HGO’s inaugural Giving Voice recital in 2020. Career highlights include the 2022 Grammy Award-winning Metropolitan Opera production of Akhnaten and 2021 Grammy Award-winning recording of Richard Danielpour’s oratorio The Passion of Yeshua with the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra; her sold-out Carnegie Hall Recital debut; her role debut of Kasturbai in Satyagraha at LA Opera; her debuts at Dutch National Opera and the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona; creating the role of Josefa Segovia in the world premiere of John Adams’s Girls of the Golden West at San Francisco Opera; and performing in the world premiere of Bel Canto at the Lyric Opera of Chicago. She is the recipient of numerous honors including the prestigious 2018 Sphinx Medal of Excellence Award, a 2016 Richard Tucker Career Grant, a 2012 Marian Anderson Award, and many more.

CAITLIN LYNCH (UNITED STATES) SOPRANO—CALLIE VAN LEW

Butler Studio alumna Caitlin Lynch was the first-place winner in HGO’s 2008 Eleanor McCollum Competition Concert of Arias. She previously performed with HGO as Hero in Beatrice and Benedict (2008), a soloist in Chorus! (2009), First Lady in The Magic Flute (2022), and in Celebrating Carlisle Floyd (2022). During the 2022-23 season, Lynch helped celebrate the 25th anniversary of Music of Remembrance with performances of Jake Heggie’s Another Sunrise in Seattle, San Francisco, and Chicago; she also covered the role of Clarissa Vaughan in the stage premiere of Kevin Puts and Greg Pierce’s The Hours at the Metropolitan Opera. Future seasons bring Lynch back to the Metropolitan Opera as the First Lady in The Magic Flute. Lynch’s 2021-22 season included her company debut at Austin Opera, singing the role of Contessa Almaviva in The Marriage of Figaro. Other notable operatic appearances include Donna Anna in Don Giovanni with English National Opera; Contessa Almaviva with San Diego Opera and Seattle Opera; and Violetta in La traviata and Marie Antoinette in Corigliano’s The Ghost of Versailles with Chautauqua Opera. Lynch studied at the University of Michigan and the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music. In addition to training with HGO’s Butler Studio, she was part of the young artist programs of Seattle Opera and the Glimmerglass Festival.

NICHOLAS NEWTON  (UNITED STATES) BASS-BARITONE—HENRY

Butler Studio alumnus Nicholas Newton’s many previous roles with HGO include Sacristan in Tosca and Second Soldier in Salome (2023), Friar Laurence in Romeo and Juliet (2022), Daddy/Tim in the world premiere of The Snowy Day (2021), Billy King in performances of Marian’s Song at Miller Outdoor Theatre (2021) and in the opera’s world premiere (2020), and Monterone in Rigoletto (2019). He is the third prize winner in HGO’s 2019 Eleanor McCollum Competition Concert of Arias and an alumnus of HGO’s Young Artists Vocal Academy (2016). Newton’s other engagements during the 2023-24 season include Alidoro in Cinderella at Lyric Opera of Chicago; a new production of John Adams’s El Niño at the Metropolitan Opera; and Leporello in a new production of Don Giovanni at Santa Fe Opera. During the 2022-23 season, Newton’s engagements included the roles of Monterone in Rigoletto at Dallas Opera, Ariodate in Xerxes at Detroit Opera, Peter in Hansel and Gretel at Lyric Opera of Chicago, and Don Basilio in The Barber of Seville at Cincinnati Opera. Other highlights of recent seasons include Don Basilio in The Barber of Seville at Santa Fe Opera, joining the roster of the Metropolitan Opera to cover the role of Garibaldo in Rodelinda; the roles of Colline in La bohème and Judge Turpin in Sweeney Todd with Wolf Trap Opera; and Monterone in Rigoletto with Opera Theatre of Saint Louis. Newton is also an avid concert performer and recitalist and a co-founder of the in-progress Black Opera Database. A 2021 Sullivan Award winner, he earned his Bachelor of Music degree in Vocal Performance from San Diego State University and his Master of Music degree in Vocal Performance from Rice University.

MICHAEL MAYES (UNITED STATES) BARITONE—TRAVIS BRIGGS

Baritone Michael Mayes enjoys a busy operatic career in both traditional and contemporary operatic roles with theaters throughout the United States and Europe. He performed the title role in Rigoletto with HGO in 2019 and as Captain von Trapp in My Favorite Things, the company’s 2020 outdoor singalong featuring songs from The Sound of Music Mayes made his critically acclaimed debut as Joseph De Rocher in Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking in 2018 with Teatro Real and went on to engagements at houses including Staatsoper Stuttgart, English National Opera, The Barbican, Theatre of Sound, and Bergen National Opera. In the 2022-23 season, Mayes performed the title role in the U.S. premiere of a new translation of Bluebeard’s Castle with The Atlanta Opera and again with the Edinburgh International Festival, made his role and company debut as Mr. Potter in It’s a Wonderful Life at English National Opera, sang Alberich in The Dallas Opera’s Das Rheingold, and sang the title role in Saint François d’Assise at Staatsoper Stuttgart. He made his role debut as Captain von Trapp in The Sound of Music and reprised his role as Daddy in Taking Up Serpents, both

at The Glimmerglass Festival. Other notable recent engagements include Il Conte di Luna in Il trovatore with Seattle Opera, Central City Opera, and The Glimmerglass Festival; the title role in Wozzeck with Des Moines Metro Opera; Bluebeard with Theater of Sound (U.K.); Rigoletto with Boston Lyric Opera and Nashville Opera; and Richard Nixon in Nixon in China at Staatstheater Stuttgart, a role he will reprise there in the 2023-24 season in addition to singing Alberich in Das Rheingold. He also sings Alberich at Seattle Opera, Bluebeard at Edinburgh International Festival, and David in The Righteous at Santa Fe Opera.

JOSHUA BLUE (UNITED KINGDOM/ UNITED STATES)

TENOR—WILSON

Joshua Blue is making his HGO mainstage debut. In spring 2023, he performed the role of Langston Rodriguez in HGO-commissioned opera Another City at Ecclesia Houston. Also this season, he performs as Tamino in The Magic Flute with the Metropolitan Opera and as Colin in The Anonymous Lover with Opera Philadelphia. During the 2022-23 season, he performed with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl for Beethoven’s Symphony #9. He also returned to Opera Philadelphia to sing La bohème, as well as the Metropolitan Opera for Don Carlo and Dialogues of the Carmelites. At Carnegie Hall he appeared with Musica Sacra and Oratorio Society of New York for Handel’s Messiah, joined the Temple University Chorus and Orchestra for Adolphus Hailstork’s Done Made My Vow, and gave a performance of Beethoven’s Symphony #9 for the United Nations General Assembly. Blue has performed with the Philadelphia Orchestra, Los Angeles Opera, National Symphony Orchestra, Washington National Opera, Seiji Ozawa Matsumoto Festival, Orchestra of St. Luke's, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, Wolf Trap Opera, and Austin Opera. He appears on the recording of Moravec’s Sanctuary Road with New York Festival of Song, which was nominated for a 2021 Grammy Award. He holds degrees from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and The Juilliard School.

URBAN BUSH WOMEN (UNITED STATES)

Beginning this year, Urban Bush Women (UBW) celebrates its 40th anniversary with a slate of performances—including Intelligence —and other programs across the country. The company burst onto the dance scene in 1984, with bold, innovative, demanding, and exciting works that brought under-told stories to life through the art and vision of its award-winning Founder and Visioning Partner, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar. The company continues to weave contemporary dance, music, and text with the history, culture, and spiritual traditions of the African Diaspora under Co-Artistic Directors Chanon Judson and Mame Diarra Speis. UBW performs regularly in New York City and tours nationally and internationally. The company has been commissioned by presenters nationwide, and includes among its honors a New York Dance and Performance Award

(“Bessie”); the Capezio Award for Outstanding Achievement in Dance; a Black Theater Alliance Award; two Doris Duke Awards for New Work from the American Dance Festival; and designation as one of America’s Cultural Treasures by the Ford Foundation. Off the concert stage, UBW has developed an extensive community engagement program called BOLD (Builders, Organizers, and Leaders through Dance). UBW’s largest community engagement project is its Summer Leadership Institute (SLI), established in 1997. This 10-day intensive training program serves as the foundation for all the company’s community engagement activities, connecting dance professionals and community-based artists/ activists in a learning experience to leverage the arts as a vehicle for civic engagement. UBW launched the Urban Bush Women Choreographic Center Initiative (CCI) in January 2016 and the Choreographic Center Initiative Producing Program (CCI 2.0) in 2022. Its CCI and CCI 2.0 fellowships support the development of women choreographers and producers of color and other underheard voices.

COURTNEY J. COOK (UNITED STATES)

URBAN BUSH WOMEN DANCER

Courtney J. Cook is making her HGO debut. She is the associate artistic director of Urban Bush Women. Cook studied at Virginia Commonwealth University. She has performed with choreographers Maria Bauman and Marguerite Hemmings, and with ModArts Dance Collective and Betty’s Daughter Arts Collaborative, among others. In 2018, she received a New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award for Outstanding Performer. She is currently collaborating with Tendayi Kuumba and Greg Purnell on FLUXX.

LOREN DAVIDSON (UNITED STATES)

URBAN BUSH WOMEN DANCER

Loren Davidson, making her HGO debut, holds a Master of Fine Arts degree in performance and choreography with a concentration in dance medicine and science. Davidson has taught contemporary dance as faculty at the Florida State University School of Dance, the American Dance Festival, New World School of the Arts, New York University, PerryMansfield Performing Arts School & Camp, NOVA Southeastern College, and Miami Dade College. She has completed multiple trainings and certifications in Pilates, Gyrokinesis, brain-dance education, and trauma-informed somatics practices. Formerly with Rosie Herrera Dance Theatre and Adele Myers and Dancers in Miami, she continues to develop creative healing rituals and movement curriculum. She is currently a Pilates instructor at Naples Community Hospital while offering Pilates and somaticsbased practices to the city’s addiction and mental health recovery community. She teaches virtually at Synergy Mind & Body in Cookeville, Tennessee and Polestar Pilates in Miami.

KENTORIA EARLE (UNITED STATES)

URBAN BUSH WOMEN DANCER

Kentoria Earle, making her HGO debut, obtained her Master of Arts degree in Dance and Studio Related Studies from The Florida State University. She is a Brooklyn-based performing artist and collaborator who has worked with choreographers/artists such as Renegade Performance Group, Abigail Levine, and Urban Bush Women as an apprentice. She is working to build an artistic process that looks at solo and improvisational practices as a way to tap into ancestry and lineage-based movement exploration. She believes these practices support and open up spaces where artists can be fully present for what often results in holistic and sustainable approaches to our healing, individually and collectively.

ROOBI

GASKINS (UNITED STATES)

URBAN BUSH WOMEN DANCER

Roobi Gaskins, making her HGO debut, is an NYC-based artist who specializes in dance, choreography, and garment construction. Although she has always had a passion for dance, she owes her movement genesis and training to 14 years of competitive figure skating, where she competed internationally as a member of the Puerto Rican national team.  She began her formal dance training at Bard College, where she received a Bachelor of Arts in Dance. She was an apprentice with Urban Bush Women in 201920, and has also performed works with artists including Abby Z and the New Utility, Brownbody, 7NMS, and Trisha Brown.

SYMARA JOHNSON (UNITED

STATES)

URBAN BUSH WOMEN DANCER

Symara Johnson, making her HGO debut, is an Urban Bush Women company member. A Portland, Oregon native currently residing in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, she has immersed herself in interdisciplinary and choreographic studies globally. She is a recipient of the Dai Ailian Foundation Scholarship based in Trinidad and Tobago. Symara is a graduate of the Beijing Dance Academy and SUNY Purchase’s Conservatory of Dance program. She currently is a CPR 2022 AIR. Johnson has presented work throughout New York City and Germany. She has danced works by and for Kevin Wynn, Ogemdi Ude, Rena Butler, Jasmine Hearn, Hannah Garner, Nattie Trogdon+Hollis Bartlett, Slowdanger, Marion Spencer, Joanna Kotze, Netta Yerushalmy, Christoph Winkler, and more.

BIANCA LETICIA MEDINA (UNITED

STATES)

URBAN BUSH WOMEN DANCER

Bianca Leticia Medina, making her HGO debut, is an Urban Bush Women company member. A Boricua-Mexicana, Chicagoborn, and New York City-based dance artist, she began her career based in Los Angeles working as a full-time dancer, choreographer, and teaching artist touring globally with CONTRA-TIEMPO Activist Dance Theater, Viver Brasil Dance Company, and choreographer/collaborator Marina Magalhães. Medina holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Dance from the University of Iowa. She has studied in-depth in Salvador, Bahia, and Brazil with internationally acclaimed choreographer Vera Passos. She is the rehearsal director and co-choreographer of Magalhães’s Creative Capital Award-winning project, Body as a Crossroads.

LOVE MUWWAKKIL (UNITED STATES}

URBAN BUSH WOMEN DANCER

Love Muwwakkil, making her HGO debut, is a freelance performer, teacher, and choreographer based in Austin. She choreographed and performed in ReSourced: Portals of Possibility. Other choreography credits include Let Them See, But You Could Have Held My Hand, and A Recipe for Action. Career highlights include serving as rehearsal director and company member for Urban Bush Women, HAIRSPRAY with Royal Caribbean, working with contemporary pole dance companies AeraDance and The Pulse project, serving as rehearsal director with Gesel Mason Performance Projects, and Taylor Mac’s 24 Decade History of Popular Music. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of North Carolina – Greensboro and a Master of Fine Arts degree in Dance and Social Justice from the University of Texas – Austin.

MIKAILA WARE (UNITED STATES)

URBAN BUSH WOMEN DANCER

Mikaila Ware, making her HGO debut, has a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Florida State University. She began her dance training at Fort Stewart, Georgia at the age of five. Now a New York-based movement artist, Ware has worked in the mediums of dance and film with choreographers Davalois Fearon, Kayla Farrish, André Zachery, and Johnnie Cruise Mercer. Her performances have been featured in outlets including the New York Times, Dance Magazine, and Dance Enthusiast. She completed the Accessibility Partnerships and Programs Fellowship at Lincoln Center and is an alumna of the Diversity in Arts Leadership program with the Arts and Business Council of New York.

MUSIC BY Giuseppe Verdi

LIBRETTO BY Arrigo Boito, based on William Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor and King Henry IV—Part 1 and Part 2

Sung in Italian with projected English translation

The performance lasts approximately 2 hours and 30 minutes, including one intermission.

BROWN THEATER

A Production of Los Angeles Opera

The activities of Houston Grand Opera are supported in part by funds provided by the City of Houston through Houston Arts Alliance and by a grant from the Texas Commission on the Arts.

QUICK START GUIDE

THE OPERA IN ONE SENTENCE

Sir John Falstaff intends to better his fortunes by wooing two wealthy wives with identical letters, but when they discover his plan, they decide to get the last laugh.

BACKGROUND

Falstaff opened in 1893 after nearly four years of development between composer Giuseppe Verdi and librettist Arrigo Boito, bringing together two categories of opera—another Shakespeare opera, and another comedy—that Verdi had been longing to compose. Combining them proved to be the perfect coup for his final opera. His only previous comedy, Un giorno di regno, opened 53 years earlier in 1840, and had never entered the ranks of his most popular works. His previous two operas based on Shakespeare were Macbeth in 1847 and Otello in 1887. Boito adapted his libretto for Falstaff from three different Shakespeare plays: the two parts of Henry IV and The Merry Wives of Windsor. Shakespearean lore states that, following the success of Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2, Queen Elizabeth I herself asked Shakespeare to write a play about her favorite character, Sir John Falstaff, falling in love—though the Bard had other ideas, writing a cheeky, raucous comedy rather than the requested romance.

WHAT TO LISTEN FOR

The final scene of Falstaff is the culmination of multiple pranks: Alice and Meg get the better of Falstaff yet again by luring him into the woods for a rendezvous with Alice that turns into a whole crowd of people dressed as witches, elves, and fairies poking and teasing him; they also get the better of Alice’s husband Ford by dressing Bardolph as Nannetta, by which Ford accidentally marries his daughter to her true love, Fenton, rather than the wealthier man he’d like her to marry. Both men take the jests in good fun, and the opera ends in a ten-voice fugue on the line “Tutto nel mondo è burla.” The text is Boito’s own joke on Shakespeare’s famous As You Like It

monologue, “All the world’s a stage,” as the Falstaff characters facetiously state that “All the world’s a joke,” going on to say that “he who laughs last, laughs best.” A musical fugue is widely considered to be one of the most complex compositional techniques, in which the musical “subject” (the main melody) is layered over itself in multiple voices. Each “entry” of the subject is notable, and as more voices enter, the counterpoint becomes, harmonically and structurally, rather delicate. The complexity of the musical fugue is underscored by musicologist Erwin Ratz, who stated that the “fugal technique...was given only to the greatest geniuses.” That Verdi chose the fugue’s complex counterpoint for the final scene of his final opera is itself one of his great jokes: as a teenager, he had been rejected from the Milan Conservatory because of his “lack of understanding of the rules of counterpoint.” Verdi got the last laugh.

FUN FACT

Verdi’s version is the most famous of the musical settings of Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, but it is far from the only, with nearly a dozen different adaptations. Composer Otto Nicolai and librettist Salomon Hermann Mosenthal wrote the next most-performed, a German Singspiel with the same title as the Shakespeare, Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor. English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote the text and music to Sir John in Love, his only work that he labeled an opera (though he wrote many musical stage works that he simply labeled differently). Antonio Salieri, the famed rival of Mozart, wrote a Falstaff to a libretto by Carlo Prospero Defranceschi. Perhaps the most unusual is a French opéra-comique by composer Ambroise Thomas and librettists Joseph-Bernard Rosier and Adolphe de Leuven. Titled Le songe d’une nuit d’été (A Midsummer Night’s Dream), the opera does not share a plot with the Shakespeare play of the same title, but rather recounts an original story in which Shakespeare himself is drunkenly escorted to the palace, at the order of Queen Elizabeth I, by none other than Sir John Falstaff.

CAST & CREATIVE

CAST (in order of vocal appearance)

Doctor Caius

Martin Bakari *

Falstaff Reginald Smith, Jr. ‡

Bardolph

Michael McDermott *†

Michelle Beale and Dick Anderson/

Dr. Ellen R. Gritz and Mr. Milton D. Rosenau Jr. Fellow

Pistol Daniel Noyola ‡

Meg Page

Alice Ford

Mistress Quickly

Nannetta

Fenton

Emily Treigle †

Mr. and Mrs. James W. Crownover/ John Serpe and Tracy Maddox Fellow

Nicole Heaston ‡

Jennifer Johnson Cano

Andrea Carroll ‡

Jack Swanson *

Ford Blake Denson ‡

CREATIVE TEAM

Conductor

Director

Set and Costume Designer

Lighting Designer

Fight Director

Intimacy Director

Chorus Director

Italian Diction Coach

Musical Preparation

Stage Manager

Assistant Director

* Mainstage debut

† Butler Studio artist

‡ Former Butler Studio artist

Patrick Summers

Sarah and Ernest Butler Chair

Paula Suozzi

Adrian Linford

Michael James Clark

Luke Fedell

Skye Bronfenbrenner

Richard Bado ‡

Sarah and Ernest Butler

Chorus Director Chair

Jennifer Ringo ‡

Madeline Slettedahl

William Woodard *

Brian August

Bruno Baker

PRODUCTION CREDITS

English supertitles by Scott F. Heumann. Supertitles called by Matthew Neumann. Original production funded by Brindell Roberts Gottlieb in memory of Milton Gottlieb’s centennial anniversary. Set construction by CBS Scenic Studios and Royal Opera House.

Costume construction by the Los Angeles Opera Costume Shop.

Performing artists, stage directors, and choreographers are represented by the American Guild of Musical Artists, AFL-CIO, the union for opera professionals in the United States.

Scenic, costume, and lighting designers and assistant designers are represented by United Scenic Artists, IATSE Local USA-829. Orchestral musicians are represented by the Houston Professional Musicians Association, Local #65-699, American Federation of Musicians. Stage crew personnel provided by IATSE, Local #51.

Wardrobe personnel provided by Theatrical Wardrobe Union, Local #896. This production is being recorded for archival purposes.

ACT I

Sir John Falstaff holds court in the Garter Inn with his comrades, Bardolph and Pistol. When Doctor Caius enters to accuse Bardolph and Pistol of robbing him, Falstaff dismisses the charges with mock solemnity. Seeking to better his fortunes, Falstaff plans to woo two wealthy matrons, Alice Ford and Meg Page. He has written identical love letters to each, but his henchmen decide their ethics forbid them to deliver the notes. Falstaff gives the letters to a page boy instead, lecturing Bardolph and Pistol—who had just been accused of robbing Doctor Caius—on their claims of honor as he chases them from the inn. In the garden outside Ford’s house, Meg and Alice quickly discover they have received identical letters and are encouraged by the Fords’ daughter Nannetta and a neighbor, Mistress Quickly, to take revenge on Falstaff. Meanwhile, Bardolph and Pistol have come to warn Ford of Falstaff’s plot to seduce Alice. Caius and Fenton, who are rivals for Nannetta’s love, add their warnings about Falstaff’s intentions, and Ford is enraged and jealous.

ACT II

Mistress Quickly finds Falstaff at the Garter Inn and assures him that both Alice and Meg return his ardor. Falstaff gleefully arranges a meeting with Alice. The next visitor is Alice’s jealous husband Ford, unaware of the ladies’ plot, pretending to be “Mr. Brook” and seeking Falstaff’s advice about how to woo Mistress Ford. To Ford’s horror, Falstaff says that he intends to woo Alice himself and already has a rendezvous scheduled for that afternoon. Ford vows revenge.

At Ford’s house, Quickly tells Alice and Meg about her visit with the knight. Nannetta pouts that her father has promised her to Caius, but the women assure her they won’t permit the marriage. Then, Falstaff’s arrival being near, all hide except Alice. Falstaff arrives and begins his awkward seduction of Alice. He is cut short when Quickly announces Meg’s imminent approach. Falstaff leaps behind a screen, and Meg sails in to report that Ford is on his way over in a fury. The women are surprised when Meg’s “fib,” part of

the ladies’ plot and intended to frighten Falstaff, turns out to be true: Ford and his men indeed show up and begin to search the house in a rage, while Falstaff takes refuge in the dirty laundry basket. Alice orders her servants to heave the basket into the River Thames, then leads her husband to the window to see Falstaff dumped into the muddy river.

INTERMISSION ACT III

Outside the inn, Falstaff bemoans his misadventure. His reflections are halted by Quickly, who insists that Alice still loves him and proves it with a note from Alice asking him to come dressed as the “Black Huntsman” to Windsor Park at midnight. Alice and the others go to the park dressed up as wood sprites, planning to frighten Falstaff. Everyone is waiting to deliver the final trick when Falstaff lumbers in. Scarcely has he greeted Alice than Meg warns of approaching demons. As the knight cowers, the “fairies” torment him until he begs for mercy. Ford becomes the new target of their ridicule when he, thinking to wed Nannetta to Caius, instead marries her to Fenton. All being forgiven, Falstaff and the others celebrate folly as an essential attribute of humanity.

PERFORMANCE HISTORY

Falstaff was first performed at HGO during the 1967-68 season. Subsequent performances took place in seasons 1977-78, 1986-87, and 2004-05.

HGO ORCHESTRA

Patrick Summers, Artistic and Music Director

Sarah and Ernest Butler Chair

Eun Sun Kim, Principal Guest Conductor

VIOLIN

Denise Tarrant*, Concertmaster

Sarah and Ernest Butler Concertmaster Chair

Chloe Kim*, Assistant Concertmaster

Natalie Gaynor*, Principal Second Violin

Carrie Kauk*, Assistant Principal Second Violin

Miriam Belyatsky*

Anabel Ramirez-Detrick*

Rasa Kalesnykaite†

Hae-a Lee-Barnes*

Chavdar Parashkevov*

Mary Reed*

Erica Robinson*

Linda Sanders*

Oleg Sulyga*

Sylvia VerMeulen*

Melissa Williams*

Zubaida Azezi

Lindsey Baggett

Andres Gonzalez

Kana Kimura

Emily Madonia

Mila Neal

Rachel Shepard

Hannah Watson

VIOLA

Eliseo Rene Salazar*, Principal

Lorento Golofeev*, Assistant Principal

Gayle Garcia-Shepard*

Erika C. Lawson*

Suzanne LeFevre*

Dawson White†

Sarah Mason

Matthew Weathers

Sergein Yap

CELLO

Barrett Sills*, Principal

Erika Johnson*, Assistant Principal

Ariana Nelson†

Wendy Smith-Butler*

Steven Wiggs†

David Dietz

Shino Hayashi

Kristiana Ignatjeva

DOUBLE BASS

Dennis Whittaker†, Principal

Erik Gronfor*, Acting Principal

Carla Clark*, Acting Assistant Principal

Deborah Dunham

Paul Ellison

FLUTE

Henry Williford*, Principal

Tyler Martin*

Izumi Miyahara

OBOE

Elizabeth Priestly Siffert*, Principal

Mayu Isom*

ENGLISH HORN

Spring Hill

CLARINET

Sean Krissman†, Principal

Rebecca Tobin, Acting Principal

Eric Chi*

BASSOON

Amanda Swain*, Principal

Michael Allard†

Micah Doherty

HORN

Sarah Cranston*, Principal

Kimberly Penrod Minson*

Spencer Park*

Kevin McIntyre

Gavin Reed

TRUMPET

Tetsuya Lawson*, Principal

Randal Adams*

Gerardo Mata

TROMBONE

Thomas Hultén*, Principal

Mark Holley*

Justin Bain†

Ben Osborne

CIMBASSO

Mark Barton*, Principal

TIMPANI

Alison Chang*, Principal

PERCUSSION

Richard Brown*, Principal

Christina Carroll

HARP

Laurie Meister, Acting Principal

GUITAR

Mark Moore

BANDA

Gavin Reed, Horn

ORCHESTRA PERSONNEL MANAGER

Richard Brown*

* HGO Orchestra core musician

† HGO Orchestra core musician on leave this production

HGO CHORUS

Richard Bado, Chorus Director

Sarah and Ernest Butler Chorus Director Chair

Nathan Abbott

Dennis Arrowsmith

Sarah Bannon

Alyssa Barnes

Megan Berti

Steve Buza

Esteban Cordero

Callie Denbigh

Ashly Evans

Peter Farley

Dallas Gray

Sarah Hardin

Frankie Hickman

Austin Hoeltzel

Julie Hoeltzel

Jon Janacek

Katherine Jones

Joe Key

Melissa Krueger

Wesley Landry

WHO'S WHO

PATRICK SUMMERS  (UNITED STATES) CONDUCTOR

SUPERNUMERARIES

Aelo Balthrop

Aria Carr

Samuel de Llano

Valentina Tikal Nuila

Antonio Rico

Christa Ruiz-Lundgren

Sarah Lee

Marcus Lonardo

Amelia Love

Alejandro Magallón

Heath Martin

Norman Mathews

Katherine McDaniel

Patrick Perez

Abby Powell

Said Pressley

Teresa Procter

Nicholas Rathgeb

Gabrielle Reed

Christina Rigg

Francis Rivera

Hannah Roberts

Emily Robinson

Johnny Salvesen

Kade Smith

Kaitlyn Stavinoha

Timothy J. Fletcher

Kam Houston

Brock Huerter

Zach Keen

Alan Kim

Marlee McAfee

Nolan Tang

Nick Ward

Haroon Zuberi

IN LOVING MEMORY: ANTONIO MARTINEZ

Long time HGO chorister Tony Martinez passed away this summer. During Tony’s 25-year tenure at HGO, he appeared in more than 60 productions and served as the local America Guild of Musical Artists Chair.

Tony was a leader among his fellow choral musicians, and we honor him with Falstaff, which was a piece that he loved and admired, especially the final fugue.

Sarah and Ernest Butler Chair

Patrick Summers was named artistic and music director of HGO in 2011 after having served as the company’s music director since 1998. Some highlights of his work at HGO include conducting the company’s first-ever complete cycle of Wagner’s Ring and its first performances of the Verdi Requiem; conducting the first major American production of Smyth’s The Wreckers; collaborating on the world premieres of Tarik O’Regan’s The Phoenix, André Previn’s Brief Encounter, Christopher Theofanidis’s The Refuge, Jake Heggie’s It’s a Wonderful Life, The End of the Affair, and Three Decembers, Carlisle Floyd’s Cold Sassy Tree and Prince of Players, Tod Machover’s Resurrection, and Joel Thompson’s The Snowy Day ; leading the American premiere of Weinberg’s Holocaust opera The Passenger, both at HGO and on tour to the Lincoln Center Festival; and nurturing the careers of such artists as Christine Goerke, Ailyn Pérez, Joyce DiDonato, Ana María Martínez, Ryan McKinny, Tamara Wilson, Albina Shagimuratova, Anthony Roth Costanzo, Norman Reinhardt, Jamie Barton, and Dimitri

Pittas. Maestro Summers has taken the podium for Opera Australia, Deutsche Oper Berlin, Lyric Opera of Chicago, and the Metropolitan Opera. He has enjoyed a long association with San Francisco Opera (SFO) and was honored in 2015 with the San Francisco Opera Medal. His work with SFO includes conducting Jake Heggie’s Moby-Dick, which was recorded and telecast on PBS’s Great Performances

In 2017, he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Music degree by Indiana University. He was recently named Co-Artistic Director of the Aspen Music Festival’s Opera Theater and VocalARTS alongside Renée Fleming. During HGO’s 2023-24 season, he also conducts Madame Butterfly. During HGO’s 2022-23 season, Summers conducted The Wreckers and The Marriage of Figaro; and in 2021-22 he conducted The Snowy Day, Dialogues of the Carmelites, and Romeo and Juliet. Other recent engagements include Dead Man Walking at the Israeli Opera.

PAULA SUOZZI (UNITED STATES) DIRECTOR

Paula Suozzi previously served as revival director for HGO’s Eugene Onegin (2015). She is the executive stage director of the Metropolitan Opera Association, where

she has directed revivals of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Der Rosenkavalier, The Marriage of Figaro, and Mefistofele, and assisted on over 20 productions. She collaborates with directors around the world, including Ivo Van Hove, Phelim McDermott, and William Kentridge, traveling to Festival Aix en Provence and the Sydney Opera House, among others. She helped to develop the Met’s Stage Director and Stage Manager Fellowship training program to create opportunity and increase diversity across the operatic industry; the program is now supported by Bank of America. She has collaborated with Patrick Summers many times, including staging Falstaff with him at the podium in a critically acclaimed production at Aspen Music Festival and School in 2022. Suozzi served as artistic director of Milwaukee Shakespeare and associate artistic director of Skylight Music Theatre. As a freelance director of theater and opera, she has staged everything from Twelfth Night to The Food Chain to Guys and Dolls. She has staged work at companies such as Lyric Opera of Chicago, San Francisco Opera, Grand Théâtre de Genève, Illinois Shakespeare Festival, Florentine Opera Company, and Bialystock & Bloom Theatre Company. As a coach and teacher, she has contributed her talents to the CoOperative Program at Westminster Choir College, the Metropolitan Opera National Council semi-finalists, and the Ryan Opera Center at the Lyric Opera of Chicago.

ADRIAN LINFORD (UNITED KINGDOM) SET AND COSTUME DESIGNER

Previously for HGO, Adrian Linford served as associate set designer for The Little Prince (2003) and Aida (2007). In the United States, his credits include Rigoletto and La Grande Duchesse du Gerolstein (Santa Fe Opera), Falstaff (LA Opera, Dallas Opera), Orfeo ed Eurydice (Minnesota Opera), The Bald Soprano and The Maids (New York), and Bluebeard’s Castle (Atlanta Opera), which received the Royal Philharmonic Society Opera Award in the U.K. and will be presented as part of the International Edinburgh Festival this year, after performances in New Zealand and at the Beijing Music Festival. Linford was nominated for the Outstanding Achievement in Design Award for the Canadian production of Bluebeard, which was performed in Toronto earlier this year. His British production of The Habit of Art was a New York Times Critic’s Pick (Brits Off Broadway) in summer 2023. Also during the 2023-24 season, Linford returns to California to design The Barber of Seville for Opera San José. Credits in the U.K. and Europe include Manon Lescaut, Hansel and Gretel, the U.K. premiere of Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking, Street Scene, Agrippina, and Judith Weir’s The Vanishing Bridgegroom. Linford designed costumes for Eugene Onegin and The Elixir of Love (both West Green Opera); further designs include The Tempest and Henry V (Shakespeare’s Rose, York), King Lear (U.K. Tour), and The Winter’s Tale. He designed The Marriage of Figaro in Lübeck, Germany, Il turco in Italia (Nantes/Luxembourg Opera), and Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George (Theatre du Chatelet, Paris).

MICHAEL JAMES CLARK (UNITED STATES) LIGHTING DESIGNER

Michael James Clark is the Head of Lighting and Production Media for HGO. This season for the company, he also serves as lighting designer for The Big Swim and revival lighting designer for Parsifal. During HGO’s 2022-23 season, Clark was associate lighting designer for The Marriage of Figaro, Werther, and Tosca, and during the company’s 2021-22 season he created the lighting design for the world premiere production of The Snowy Day, and served as the assistant lighting designer for The Magic Flute and associate lighting designer for Carmen. He served as revival lighting designer for HGO’s production of Aida (2020) and designed lighting for mainstage and Miller Outdoor Theatre productions of La bohème (2018-19) and the world premiere of The Phoenix (2019). He lit the HGO world premieres of Some Light Emerges (2017), After the Storm (2016), and O Columbia (2015); mainstage productions of Otello (2014); Die Fledermaus, Aida, and Il trovatore (2013); La bohème, La traviata, and The Rape of Lucretia (2012); The Marriage of Figaro (2011); the world premiere of Cruzar la Cara de la Luna (2010); and numerous outdoor productions. Clark also has designed lighting for Teatro La Fenice, San Francisco Opera, the Canadian Opera Company, Stages Repertory Theatre, Theatre Under the Stars, Rice University, and the 2007 Prague Quadrennial. He holds a degree in lighting design from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts.

LUKE FEDELL (UNITED STATES) FIGHT DIRECTOR

For information on Luke Fedell, please see page 42.

SKYE BRONFENBRENNER (UNITED STATES) INTIMACY DIRECTOR

For information on Skye Bronfenbrenner, please see page 42.

RICHARD BADO (UNITED STATES) CHORUS DIRECTOR

Sarah and Ernest Butler Chorus Director Chair

Butler Studio alumnus Richard Bado is director of artistic planning and chorus director at HGO. He made his professional conducting debut in 1989 leading HGO’s acclaimed production of Show Boat at the newly restored Cairo Opera House in Egypt. Since then, he has conducted for Houston Ballet, La Scala, Opéra national de Paris, New York City Opera, the

Aspen Music Festival, Tulsa Opera, the Russian National Orchestra, the Florida Philharmonic, the Montreal Symphony, and Wolf Trap Opera. This season he conducts The Sound of Music for HGO and again conducts performances of The Nutcracker with the Houston Ballet. In addition, he appears as the character of Alfred Grünfeld, an onstage pianist, in the Houston Ballet production of Mayerling. An accomplished pianist, Bado has appeared regularly with Renée Fleming in recital. He has also played for Cecilia Bartoli, Frederica von Stade, Susan Graham, Denyce Graves, Marcello Giordani, Ramón Vargas, Samuel Ramey, Jamie Barton, Ryan McKinny, and Michael Spyres. Bado holds music degrees from the Eastman School of Music, where he received the 2000 Alumni Achievement Award, and West Virginia University; he also studied advanced choral conducting with Robert Shaw. For 12 years, he was the director of the opera studies program at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music. He has also worked for the Metropolitan Opera, Seattle Opera, the Bolshoi Opera Young Artist Program, Opera Australia, Santa Fe Opera, and Opera Theater of St. Louis.  He received HGO’s Silver Rose Award in 2013 in celebration of his 25th year as chorus master.

REGINALD SMITH, JR. (UNITED STATES) BARITONE—FALSTAFF

Butler Studio alumnus Reginald Smith, Jr. has performed at HGO in roles including Pascoe in The Wreckers (2022); Amonasro in Aida (2020); Bonze in Madame Butterfly, Speaker of the Temple, Priest, and Armored Man in outdoor performances of The Magic Flute, and Speaker in selected mainstage performances of The Magic Flute (all 2015); Dancaïre in Carmen and Marullo in Rigoletto (2014); and Blind in Die Fledermaus (2013). He appeared with the company in Giving Voice in 2020 and gave a Live from The Cullen recital with Richard Bado for HGO Digital in 2021. Future engagements include a return to the Lyric Opera of Chicago as Amonasro in Aida. During the 2022-23 season, Smith made his debut with the Santa Fe Opera as Scarpia in Tosca, and Fort Worth Opera as Amonasro in Aida. His 2021-22 season included debuts with Lyric Opera of Chicago as Uncle Paul in Terrence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones, the San Diego Opera as Don Alfonso in Così fan tutte, and Charleston’s Holy City Arts and Lyric Opera as Germont in La traviata. Smith’s 2019-20 season opened with his much-anticipated debut at The Metropolitan Opera as Jim in Porgy and Bess; he also performed the role of Jake in Porgy and Bess at Atlanta Opera. The Grammy and Emmy-winning baritone was the 2021 U.S. representative at the BBC Cardiff Singer of the World Competitions and a Grand Finals winner of the 2015 Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions. He received a 2015 Sarah Tucker Study Grant and a 2016 Career Grant from the Sullivan Foundation.

NICOLE HEASTON (UNITED STATES) SOPRANO—ALICE FORD

Butler Studio alumna and celebrated soprano Nicole Heaston has performed with

HGO many times, as the Countess in The Marriage of Figaro (2023), Liù in Turandot (2022), Mimì in La bohème (2018), Adina in The Elixir of Love (2016), Pamina in The Magic Flute (2015, 1997); Gilda in performances of Rigoletto (2001); Zerlina in Don Giovanni (1999); Susanna in The Marriage of Figaro (1998); the title role in the world premiere of Jackie O (1997); Mrs. Hayes in Susannah and St. Settlement in Four Saints in Three Acts (1996); and performances of Juliet in Romeo and Juliet (1995). In 2023 she returned to HGO as a vocal soloist for Giving Voice at Wheeler Avenue Baptist Church. During the 2023-24 season, she bows with Los Angeles Opera as Mary in Highway 1, USA, makes her debut in the title role of Thaïs with Utah Opera, and appears in a double bill of Errollyn Wallen’s Dido’s Ghost and Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas with San Francisco’s Philharmonia Baroque. During the 2022-23 season, she created the role of Claire Devon in the world premiere of Missy Mazzoli and Royce Vavrek's The Listeners at Den Norske Opera (Oslo), returned to San Francisco Opera as Amor in Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, and debuted with Philharmonia Baroque, appearing as Melissa in Handel’s Amadigi di Gaula. Her 2021-22 season included returns to San Francisco Opera, making a role debut as Despina in Così fan tutte, and a debut with Maryland Lyric Opera, singing Liù in Turandot. Other operatic highlights include Ilia in Mozart’s Idomeneo with the Metropolitan Opera, Donna Elvira in Don Giovanni with the Glyndebourne Festival, and Drusilla in Monteverdi’s The Coronation of Poppea at the Festival in Aix-en-Provence.

BLAKE DENSON (UNITED STATES) BARITONE—FORD

Butler Studio and HGO Young Artist Vocal Academy alumnus Blake Denson’s roles at HGO during the 2021-22 season included Jailer in Dialogues of the Carmelites, Morales in Carmen, Daddy/Tim in alternate cast performances of The Snowy Day, and Gregorio in Romeo and Juliet. During the 2020-21 HGO Digital season he appeared in Giving Voice; Hansel and Gretel as Peter; and Suite Española: Explorando Iberia. During the 2022-23 season, Denson made his house debut as Larkens in La fanciulla del West with the Bayerische Staatsoper. He also performed as Morales and covered Escamillo in Carmen, and performed the roles of Paolo in Simon Boccanegra, Monterone in Rigoletto, and Angelotti in Tosca with Hamburg Staatsoper. Other notable debuts last season include the English National Opera singing the role of Donner in their new production of Das Rheingold; Washington National Opera as Schaunard in La bohème; and The Santa Fe Opera as Angelotti in Tosca and Plutone in Orfeo. He also returned home to sing Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen with the Paducah Symphony. Denson recently received grants from the Tucker Music Foundation and the George London Foundation, and took honors in the International Concurs Tenor Viñas Competition and the Dallas Opera National Vocal Competition. He was a Grand Finalist winner of the 2020 Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions and the winner of the 2022 George and Nora London Award for opera.

ANDREA CARROLL (UNITED STATES) SOPRANO—NANNETTA

Butler Studio alumna Andrea Carroll has performed with HGO many times, including as Pamina in The Magic Flute (2022), Leila in The Pearl Fishers (2019), Maria in West Side Story (2018), Woglinde in Götterdämmerung (2017), Mary in It’s a Wonderful Life (2016), and Julie in Carousel (2016). During the 202223 season, Carroll performed the role of Micaëla in Carmen in her debut with Lyric Opera of Kansas City, made her role and house debut as Cunegonde in a new production of Candide at Opéra National de Lyon, made her Canadian Opera Company debut as Susanna in The Marriage of Figaro, returned to Palm Beach Opera as Nannetta in Falstaff, and debuted at The Metropolitan Opera as Zerlina in Don Giovanni. Carroll’s 2021-22 season included her debut at Milan’s Teatro alla Scala as Zerlina in Don Giovanni. In addition to roles of Mozart, Verdi, and Wagner, Carroll has appeared at the Vienna State Opera in two world premieres, singing the title role in Johanna Doderer’s Fatima and Kitty in Johannes Maria Staud’s Die Weiden. Carroll has also performed with the Glimmerglass Festival, Wolf Trap Opera, and the major companies of Oslo, Tokyo, Washington, D.C., Seattle, San Diego, Dallas, Fort Worth, and Utah. She is a recipient of a 2018 Richard Tucker Foundation Career Grant.

JACK SWANSON (UNITED STATES) TENOR—FENTON

Jack Swanson is making his HGO mainstage debut. Previously with the company, he gave a 2021 Live from the Cullen recital for HGO Digital, accompanied by Richard Bado. During the 2022-23 season he premiered the title role in Paola Prestini’s Edward Tulane with the Minnesota Opera and made debuts with the Austin Opera as Almaviva in The Barber of Seville, the Utah Opera as Tonio in La Fille du Régiment (also a role debut), and The Atlanta Opera as the title role in Candide. In concert he joined Houston’s Mercury Chamber Orchestra for Handel’s Messiah, The Utah Symphony for Carmina Burana, The Houston Symphony for Mozart’s Requiem conducted by Itzhak Perlman, and performed in recital with Matinee Musicale in Duluth. Swanson made a number of role and house debuts in the 2021-22 season: first with the Teatro Regio in Torino as Almaviva in The Barber of Seville, then with the Opéra National de Lorraine in Nancy as Tamino in The Magic Flute (a role debut), and finally at the Opéra National du Rhin in Strasbourg as Ferrando in Così fan tutte (a role he had just debuted for his return to the Oper Frankfurt).  In the summer he returned to the Santa Fe Opera as Almaviva in The Barber of Seville. In the 2020-21 season he made debuts with Oper Frankfurt as Rodrigo in a new production of Rossini’s Otello, then as Belmonte in The Abduction from the Seraglio with Opera Omaha.

JENNIFER JOHNSON CANO (UNITED STATES) MEZZO-SOPRANO— MISTRESS QUICKLY

Previously with HGO, Jennifer Johnson Cano performed the role of Mother Marie in Dialogues of the Carmelites (2022). She has garnered critical acclaim for committed performances of both new and standard repertoire, and for her performance as Offred in Poul Ruders’s The Handmaid’s Tale. With more than 100 performances on the stage at The Metropolitan Opera, her most recent roles have included Nicklausse, Emilia, Hansel, and Meg Page. During the 2022-23 season she performed at the Metropolitan Opera in Falstaff (Meg Page) and made her company debut with the Atlanta Opera in Don Giovanni (Donna Elvira); she also appeared with the New York Philharmonic, New Jersey Symphony, and Atlanta Symphony. Cano returned to the Chamber Music Society of New York, where she performed Mahler›s RückertLieder; and to the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society in an All-Bach Program with the Gamut Bach Ensemble. She joined The Lindemann Young Artist Development Program at the Metropolitan Opera after winning the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions, and made her Met debut during the 2009-10 season. Her honors include being named a First Prize winner at the Young Concert Artist International Auditions, and receiving a Sara Tucker Study Grant, a Richard Tucker Career Grant, and the George London Award. She has degrees from Webster University and Rice University.

EMILY TREIGLE (UNITED STATES) MEZZO-SOPRANO—MEG PAGE

Mr. and Mrs. James W. Crownover/ John Serpe and Tracy Maddox Fellow

A New Orleans native and Grand Finals Winner of the 2021 Metropolitan Opera Laffont Competition, Emily Treigle is a third-year Butler Studio Artist. During HGO’s 2023-24 season, she also sings Suzuki (Madame Butterfly) and covers Donna Elvira (Don Giovanni). She spent the summer as a Filene Artist with Wolf Trap Opera, where she performed as Juno/ Ino (Semele). In her previous seasons at HGO, following her 3rd place win in HGO’s 33rd annual Eleanor McCollum Competition Concert of Arias, Treigle has been seen as Flora (La traviata), Miss Violet (Another City, world premiere), Mère Jeanne (Dialogues of the Carmelites), and Gertrude (Romeo and Juliet). She has also covered the roles of Herodias (Salome) and Marcellina (The Marriage of Figaro). She appeared at the Aspen Music Festival as a Fleming Artist in 2022, as well as Wolf Trap Opera in 2021, where she covered the title role in Holst’s Savitri. Treigle pursued her Master of Music degree at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music, where she received her Bachelor of Music degree in 2020. An undeniable legacy, her grandfather was world-renowned bassbaritone Norman Treigle.

MARTIN BAKARI (UNITED STATES/ THE PHILIPPINES) TENOR—DOCTOR CAIUS

Martin Bakari is making his HGO debut. Elsewhere this season, Bakari’s roles include Mime in Das Rheingold at Seattle Opera, the tenor soloist in Messiah at Carnegie Hall with Oratorio Society of New York, Charlie Parker in Charlie Parker’s Yardbird at Indianapolis Opera, and Frederic in Pirates of Penzance at Kentucky Opera. His 2022-23 season included the role of Charlie Parker in Charlie Parker’s Yardbird at New Orleans Opera and Dayton Opera, Frederic in Pirates of Penzance at Virginia Opera, the tenor soloist in the premiere of Paul Moravec’s A Nation of Others at Carnegie Hall with Oratorio Society of New York, Messiah with the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, Pong in Turandot at Opera Colorado, Jalil/Wakil/Guard in A Thousand Splendid Suns at Seattle Opera, Carmina Burana with Symphony San Jose, a concert of arias and songs with the Harlem Chamber Players, and recitals of Paul Laurence Dunbar songs with Seattle Opera and German Lieder with Byron Schenkman at Seattle’s Benaroya Hall. Since 2016, Bakari has joined NY Harlem Productions for tours of Porgy & Bess as both Sportin’ Life and Mingo, which have marked his German debuts at Semperoper Dresden, Staatsoper Hamburg, Deutsches Theater München, Alte Oper Frankfurt, and the Kölner Philharmonie; his Israeli debuts in Haifa and Tel Aviv; and his Italian debut at Bari’s Teatro Petruzzelli. Bakari has performed with Dallas Opera, Atlanta Opera, Pittsburgh Opera, Arizona Opera, Washington National Opera, Portland Opera, Fort Worth Opera, and many other companies. A 2018 George London Competition award winner, Bakari also has received awards from the Palm Beach Opera Vocal Competition, Orpheus Vocal Competition, Tanglewood, the Juilliard School, and Boston University. Bakari’s recording of Grigory Smirnov’s Dowson Songs (Naxos) was featured by Opera News as a Critic's Choice album.

MICHAEL MCDERMOTT  (UNITED STATES)  TENOR—BARDOLF

Michelle Beale and Dick Anderson/ Dr. Ellen R. Gritz and Mr. Milton D. Rosenau Jr. Fellow

A first-year Butler Studio artist from Huntington Beach, California, tenor Michael McDermott is the third-place winner in HGO’s 2023 Eleanor McCollum Competition Concert of Arias and a 2021 alumnus of HGO’s Young Artists Vocal Academy. During HGO’s 2023-24 season, he also performs the role of 4th Esquire in Parsifal and covers Don Ottavio in Don Giovanni. In 2022 he covered the role of Don Ottavio in Don Giovanni at the Aspen Music Festival, returning in 2023 to perform Arbace in Idomeneo. At The Juilliard School in New York, he performed the roles of Spärlich in Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor and Filippo in Hadyn’s L’infedelta Delusa, as well as appearing in liederabends and recitals coached by Brian Zeger and Pierre Vallet. His recent competition wins include first prize in the 2021 Schmidt Vocal Competition and first prize in the Scholarship Division of the National Opera Association’s Carolyn Bailey Argento Competition.

McDermott received his Bachelor of Music degree from The Juilliard School, and pursued his master’s degree at Rice University studying with Robin Rice.

DANIEL NOYOLA (MEXICO) BASS—PISTOL

Butler Studio alumnus Daniel Noyola performed as Angelotti in Tosca and First Soldier in Salome in spring 2023. Also for HGO, he originated the role of Laurentino in the world premiere of El Milagro del Recuerdo/The Miracle of Remembering in 2019, and performed as Count Ceprano in Rigoletto (2019), Masetto in Don Giovanni (2019), and Colline La bohème (2018). Noyola is an ensemble member at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, where he has appeared as Pistol in Falstaff, Zuniga in Carmen, Hobson in Peter Grimes, and Truffaldino in Ariadne auf Naxos, among other roles. In 2018 he graduated from the Academy of Vocal Arts in Philadelphia, where he appeared as the title role in Don Giovanni, Ferrando in Il trovatore, Don Alfonso in Così fan tutte, and Raimondo in Lucia di Lammermoor. Previous engagements include Mustafá in The Italian Girl in Algiers with Tri-Cities Opera in New York; Dulcamara in The Elixir of Love with Sociedad Artística Sinaloense in Mexico; Figaro in The Marriage of Figaro with Oberlin in Italy; Uberto in La Serva Padrona and Luka in The Bear with the Merola Opera Program at San Francisco Opera; and the roles of Scapin and Der Lautsprecher in a double bill of L’île de Merlin and Der Kaiser von Atlantis at Wolf Trap Opera. In 2019 he represented Mexico in Plácido Domingo’s Operalia competition and has won numerous awards including first place in the Career Bridges competition in New York and the Artist Series Concert of Sarasota Competition for Voice.

SEASON 23 / 24

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THE FABRIC OF HISTORY

Quilting our intricate, messy, beautiful society into art.

By Jeremy Johnson

America is God’s Crucible, the great Melting Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming! God is making the American!” David Quixano, the main character in Israel Zangwill’s 1908 play The Melting Pot, praises cultural unification in the United States after fleeing a Russian pogrom. Zangwill’s play was wellreceived and highly influential in making “the melting pot” a commonplace analogy for United States society—but how accurate is the phrase?

Even at the time, critics asserted that the metaphor deprives immigrants of their cultures and customs, denying the existence of different cultural roots—never mind that at the play’s opening, fewer than 50 years after the Civil War and the subsequent dismantling of Reconstruction, the celebrated harmony of United States society referred only to Europeans. It points somewhat meaningfully to the contemporary mindset of white homogeneity in the U.S.; which people and cultures were welcome in the melting pot?

Since then, the idea of a melting pot has fallen away in favor of other metaphors, such as a salad bowl or a cultural mosaic. These phrases attempt to honor differences in culture and to recognize the complexity of

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the past: acknowledging that some of those cultures come from people stolen from their native lands, and that the land where these cultures now mix was itself stolen from its native people.

During the development of Intelligence, the creative team may have come across a new metaphor, surrounding something that is not only central to the opera’s story, but also speaks to the multiculturalism of the United States. How about a quilt?

In the first scene of Intelligence, Mary Jane and Lucinda sing a duet that begins playfully and jauntily about sewing and stitches, that then transforms into gorgeous, sweeping melodies through the poetry of needlework inspiring storytelling: “Which pieces of cloth will tell the story? My story. Our story. The story of what came before. Though I don’t know where I come from, and I don’t know where I’ll go, I know there will be more to sew into my story. Our story.”

They sing about sewing because Mary Jane is working on a quilt. In the opera, she is a seamstress to the Van Lew family, and so, too, was her mother. We do not know anything about Mary Jane’s mother from history, but we know Mary Jane herself was a skilled sewer. In an 1870 letter to Elizabeth Van Lew, the last known source of information on Mary Jane’s life, she declines Elizabeth’s offer of money or returning to Richmond— Mary Jane says she will make money on her own, taking up sewing and teaching.

Later in the opera, Mary Jane examines the opulence of Varina Davis’s dresses. She has an idea for sending intelligence to Elizabeth Van Lew: sew the secrets into the hem of those dresses. “What does it cost to make such things? … All so beautiful. Threaded with flesh, and blood, and bone, and despair…and secrets…sewn into the hem.” The operatic plot point comes from a historically accepted narrative of the Van Lew spy ring that has since been disproven. Though we have no historical evidence for Mary Jane sewing secrets into quilts or dress hems, it remains a poignant metaphor in the context of a quilt representing the cultural makeup of the United States. What secrets are sewn into our history? What stitches do we need to tease out to let the truth be told?

As the Mary Jane in our opera learns the truth about her family and her history, Lucinda shares the shirts, dresses, and quilts she has sewn. “Mary Jane, take the things I sewed and make a new quilt. And with clothes from the children torn from their mothers on the African shores, the American shores and the auction blocks, you will piece it together—a quilt so vast we will see it from heaven and know that we are not forgotten.

You are here to tell the story. The whole story.”

Houston, the nation’s most diverse city, coincidentally has a unique relationship with quilts. It was here, in 1974, that Karey Bresenhan started the International Quilt Festival, now the largest quilt show in the world, attracting over 50,000 visitors annually. This year the festival takes place November 2-5 at the George R. Brown Convention Center, concurrently with Intelligence, offering an interesting perspective that highlights the historical significance of quilting, its connection to our opera, and how both art forms serve the power of storytelling.

Bob Ruggiero, VP of Communications for the International Quilt Festival, spoke to us recently about the history of the festival and quilting as an art form. “When quilts first started being made, they were strictly utilitarian, to keep warm, to put on the bed, to carry things with,” he said. “They slowly became—in the last 50 or 60 years—a majority not to be used, but to be displayed and hung on the wall. It’s art, just like painting and sculpting.”

Art is storytelling, whether narrative or symbolic, and quilting is no exception. Ruggiero spoke about a collection of quilts by one artist, whose brother had a mental health issue and was killed in a tragic encounter with authority figures. Her series of quilts was related to her grief, to her brother, to mental illness, and together, they told the story of her journey.

IA SPECIAL THANK YOU

Thank you to Quilt Festival Houston for the contribution to this article and for lending the quilts featured in The Intelligence Experience located in the Wortham Theater Grand Foyer. Visit Quilt Festival Houston at the George R. Brown Convention Center from November 2-5.

Melting pots don’t tell stories the way quilts do. For a city and country as large, diverse, and complicated as ours, we could use a metaphor that not only represents where we all come from and celebrates the cultures we honor, but that also tells the story—the whole story—of our intricate, messy, beautiful society.

After you experience Intelligence, imagine the quilt of Houston, of the United States; smile at the patch of fabric that represents your life; learn about the square next to yours on the quilt, and appreciate its differences; understand the artistry that exists in each section of fabric—and remember that we are all part of one magnificent quilt. ∎

OPERA BALL 2023 A CITY OF BOLD VOICES

APRIL 15, 2023

HGO shined a spotlight on our beloved hometown at Opera Ball 2023: A City of Bold Voices, chaired by longtime company supporters Anne and Albert Chao. The evening was a bold celebration of the generous spirit and unique culture of Houston. HGO General Director and CEO Khori Dastoor welcomed a full house, announcing, “after decades of going around the world for Opera Balls past, this year we are bringing it home and celebrating our own city!”

TSU’s famous Oceans of Soul Marching Band welcomed guests to the Wortham’s red carpet. The Grand Foyer, inspired by the 2022-23 opera season’s Fortune Favors the Bold theme and dressed by The Events Company, exuded dramatic glamour with a black and gold palette as backdrop to a sea of red florals and fabulous fashions. Entertainment kicked off with the University of Houston Mariachi Pumas performing Mariachi classics, followed by a rousing performance from singer-songwriter Kim Cruse, fresh off the semifinals of NBC’s The Voice. Cruse’s showstopping rendition of Gershwin’s “Summertime” was a nod to HGO’s groundbreaking 1976 production of Porgy and Bess—an American-opera-company first that went on to receive Tony and Grammy awards and is now one of the world’s best known and most frequently performed operas.

City Kitchen Catering’s bold menu highlighted Houston’s culinary prowess, reflecting the eclectic flavors and fusions of India, Asia, Italy, Latin America, and Southern Gulf Coast cuisines. As dinner concluded, one last musical surprise delighted guests when renowned tenor Jonathan Tetelman, joined by members of the HGO Orchestra and Chorus, serenaded the party with “Nessun dorma” just before Cruse returned to the stage to kick off the dance party with the Richard Brown Orchestra. Opera Ball 2023 raised over $1.4 million toward HGO’s mission of enriching Greater Houston’s diverse community through the art of opera.

Photography by Katy Anderson and Michelle Watson/Catchlight Group

Duyen and Marc Nguyen John Serpe and Tracy Maddox, Teresa and José Ivo

Patrick Summers and Khori Dastoor

Betty and Jess Tutor, Donna Josey Chapman

Lynn Wyatt and Richard Flowers

Albert and Anne Chao, Carolyn and Jake Sabat

CJ Martin and Andrew Pappas

Anthony Startz and Jack Bell

Kim Cruse gave a showstopping rendition of "Summertime."

Josepha Immanuel, Sola Cardosa, Ashton Gilliard, Sawkia Patterson, Allyson Pritchett, Brian Dunham, Matthieu Pritchett

Nadia and Damian Gill

Fun Houston-style with the UH Mariachi Pumas Kelsey and Chip Stewart

Claudia Garnica and Christopher Halbohn

Beth Madison, Renu and Suresh Khator

Tom Ajamie and guests

Tenor Jonathan Tetelman sang "Nessun dorma."

Julia and Jason Wang

Myrtle Jones and Lisa Modica

TSU's Ocean of Soul welcomes guests.

Matthew Healey and Denise Reyes

TOSCA CAST PARTY APRIL 21, 2023

HGO patrons and company members gathered with the spectacular Tosca cast and creative team, led by soprano Tamara Wilson (Tosca), director John Caird, and conductor Benjamin Manis, on Opening Night of the praised production. The evening marked the much-lauded company debut of tenor Jonathan Tetelman, who performed the role of Cavaradossi. The impressive new Texas Avenue offices of Vinson & Elkins LLP provided the setting for artists and art lovers alike to mix and mingle over a late-night nosh from Jackson & Company Catering

Photography by Wilson Parish

PATRONS CIRCLE RECITAL APRIL 26, 2023

Jonathan Tetelman delighted droves of new Houston fans following his HGO debut as Cavaradossi in Tosca—and his surprise, roofraising performance of “Nessun dorma” at April’s Opera Ball—with a solo recital at the Corinthian. This annual recital and reception is a beloved tradition reserved for members of HGO’s Patrons Circle. For information on how to access an array of experiences like this one through Patrons Circle membership, contact Madeline Sebastian at msebastian@HGO.org.

Photography by Michelle Watson/Catchlight Group

HGO's Khori Dastoor and Patrick Summers, Tosca cast and creative team, V&E’s Glen Rosenbaum and Christopher Bacon

Stephanie and Rich Langenstein

Brenda Harvey-Traylor and Glen Rosenbaum

Chadd Mikulin, Amanda Lenertz, Sarah Long, Juan Moreno, Mauricio Perillo, Luján Stasevicius Lori and David LePori Stella Tang with son

Perhaps no aspect of the Butler Studio is more defining than change: each year, a handful of artists departs HGO to embark on operatic careers, while several hopeful and talented artists join the program. Seeing artists off “into the world” is a bittersweet joy, as we become attached; fortunately, they often return to our company and our lives, enriching us with the foundation they set during their time here and the experience they've built performing around the world.

Just as the artists come and go, the people who surround them change over time. Last season, we welcomed the wonderful Maureen Zoltek as Music Director of the Butler Studio, and she has already made a tremendous impact. The Butler Studio’s identity and traditions are carried through this continuing change, growing the reputation of the program and its large, international family of artists, supporters, and staff.

Now my own time to depart has come, as I move to New York to join the staff at the Metropolitan Opera. Houston, and especially HGO, will always hold a big place in my heart. After eight fulfilling years leading the Butler Studio, I wanted to offer a few reflections on why this treasured part of HGO is so essential to the future of these artists, and this art form.

Making Opera Is Hard

The skills required to be a singer or pianist in opera are hard-won. Just when one hurdle is cleared, another, higher one inevitably presents itself. Talent is only the starting point, from which real artistry is built. What you see on stage at HGO is the result of years of dedicated hard work, which we hope will be invisible to you as you experience our productions from your seat in the theater.

Community Matters

If making opera is difficult, what can turn that challenge to joy? The people who surround us contribute so much when it

LOOKING BACK

REFLECTIONS ON THE SARAH AND ERNEST BUTLER HOUSTON GRAND OPERA STUDIO

By Brian Speck

After eight years leading the Butler Studio, Brian Speck is setting off to New York.

comes time to rise to a challenge. Artists need a true support system, and this is one place where the Butler Studio shines. Throughout my time at HGO, there has always been an army of donors, volunteers, and staff who truly wish the best for the artists who appear on our stages. Knowing that people have your back on your best or worst day makes all the difference. The atmosphere of trust and support among the Butler Studio artists themselves is also a remarkable strength of the program. This is the foundation upon which the artists can grow.

Talent Needs Tools

Talent is the starting point. Without building skills and technique, an artist’s voice is muted. Many ideas can be imagined, but communicating what comes to mind requires more than a natural gift. The years spent in the Butler Studio are about unlocking every possible option, so that the audience can experience the artist’s full identity.

Growth Requires Space

Encouraging someone to try something new and then demanding mastery the next day is a good way to ensure that nothing changes. While the Butler Studio program asks a lot of emerging artists, the space to try things out, take risks, fail, and try again is the only way to move forward. To cultivate artistry that will be the bedrock of opera’s future, one must have room to take risks.

Empathy Is Everything

There is something deeply human about opera; although in many ways detached from reality, it makes us feel something. The relationships built behind the curtain mirror the relationship between the audience and performer. We’re all at our best when we try to understand and feel for one another. Sharing experiences, highs and lows, and (especially) celebrating the joy of a life-changing performance have been highlights of my time in Houston.

I wish every member and alumnus of the Butler Studio, our beloved HGO family, and each person who experiences a performance at HGO a lifetime of connecting through this transformative art. ∎

“

T HE SPACE TO TRY THINGS OUT, TAKE RISKS, FAIL, AND TRY AGAIN IS THE ONLY WAY TO MOVE FORWARD. ”

Speck with current Butler Studio member Navasard Hakobyan

BUTLER STUDIO ARTISTS 2023–24

Meryl Dominguez, Soprano

Mr. and Mrs. Harlan C. Stai Fellow

Navasard Hakobyan, Baritone

Melinda and Bill Brunger/ Mr. and Mrs. Charles

G. Nickson/ Gloria M. Portela Fellow

Ani Kushyan, Mezzo-Soprano

Donna and Ken Barrow/

Barbara and Pat McCelvey/ Jill A. Schaar and George Caflisch Fellow

Michael McDermott, Tenor

Michelle Beale and Dick Anderson/ Dr. Ellen R.

Gritz and Mr. Milton D. Rosenau Jr. Fellow

Michelle Papenfuss, Pianist/Coach

Dr. Saúl and Ursula Balagura/ Sharon Ley

Lietzow and Robert Lietzow/ Dr. Laura E. Sulak and Dr. Richard W. Brown Fellow

Renée Richardson, Soprano

Kathleen Moore and Steven Homer/ Carolyn J. Levy Fellow

Marco Rizzello, Pianist/Coach

Ms. Lynn Des Prez/ Dr. Gary L. Hollingsworth and Dr. Ken Hyde/ Stephanie Larsen/ Dr. and Mrs. Miguel Miro-Quesada Fellow

BUTLER STUDIO FACULTY & STAFF

Maureen Zoltek , Music Director

Mr. and Mrs. Albert B. Alkek Chair

Joanna Latini, Butler Studio Administrator

Ana María Martínez, HGO Artistic Advisor

Stephen King, Director of Vocal Instruction

Sponsored by Jill and Allyn Risley, Janet Sims, and James J. Drach Endowment Fund

Patrick Summers, Conducting Instructor and Coach

Sarah and Ernest Butler Chair

Peter Pasztor, Principal Coach

Sponsored by Mr. and Mrs. James A. Elkins Jr. Endowment Fund

BUTLER STUDIO SUPPORTERS

The Sarah and Ernest Butler Houston Grand Opera Studio is grateful for the underwriting support of Ms. Marty Dudley, Lynn Gissell, Beth Madison, and Mr. and Mrs. Richard J. Langenstein.

The Butler Studio is also thankful for the in-kind support of the Texas Voice Center and for the outstanding support of the Magnolia Houston hotel.

Additional support for the Butler Studio is provided by Mr. Chris Bacon and Mr. Craig Miller, Mr. and Mrs. Melvyn Hetzel, Ms. Diane K. Morales, Mr. Patrick Carfizzi, and the following funds within the Houston Grand Opera Endowment, Inc.:

Kirill Kuzmin, Principal Coach

Madeline Slettedahl, Assistant Conductor

William Woodard, Assistant Conductor

Brian Connelly, Piano Instructor

Kristine McIntyre, Showcase Director

Skye Bronfenbrenner, Movement Instructor

Adam Noble, Movement Instructor

Christa Gaug, German Instructor

Enrica Vagliani Gray, Italian Instructor

Sponsored by Marsha Montemayor

The Gordon and Mary Cain Foundation Endowment Fund

Marjorie and Thomas Capshaw Endowment Fund

James J. Drach Endowment Fund

The Evans and Portela Family Fund

Carol Lynn Lay Fletcher Endowment Fund

William Randolph Hearst Endowed Scholarship Fund

Charlotte Howe Memorial Scholarship Fund

Elva Lobit Opera Endowment Fund

Marian and Speros Martel Foundation Endowment Fund

Erin Gregory Neale Endowment Fund

Dr. Mary Joan Nish and Patricia Bratsas Endowed Fund

John M. O’Quinn Foundation Endowed Fund

Shell Lubricants State Company Fund

Demetrious Sampson, Jr., Tenor

Dr. Dina Alsowayel and Mr. Anthony R. Chase/ Eric McLaughlin and Elliot Castillo/

Mr. and Mrs. Hector Torres/ Mr. Trey Yates Fellow

Emily Treigle, Mezzo-Soprano

Mr. and Mrs. James W. Crownover/ John Serpe and Tracy Maddox Fellow

Erin Wagner, Mezzo-Soprano

Amy and Mark Melton/ Drs. Liz Grimm and Jack Roth/ Mrs. Nancy Haywood Fellow

Olia Prokopenko, Russian Instructor

Margo Garrett, Guest Coach

Warren Jones, Guest Coach

Hemdi Kfir, Guest Coach

Mary C. Gayler Snook Endowment Fund

Tenneco, Inc., Endowment Fund

Weston-Cargill Endowed Fund

Tell us about yourselves!

Hi, we’re Faye Chiao and Anton Dudley. We met at a wedding (not our own!). After talking for bit at dinner, Faye got up and sang an aria for the happy couple. Anton said, “Wait, you’re in opera?” Faye said, “Yes.” We applied for a grant from OPERA America, which funded our first operatic collaboration, Island of the Moon

Two years later, we got a commission from Houston Grand Opera to write Katie: The Strongest of the Strong. The opera was supposed to go into production in fall of 2020… and we think the whole world knows what happened next! Not deterred, HGO staged the opera for online audiences. We got to “Zoom in” to rehearsals and watch the final product from many states away. Now, three years later, Katie is live on stage. We couldn’t be more grateful.

How would you describe the story?

Based on the life of Austro-American weightlifter Katie Brumbach, it’s a charming and cheeky tale of Katie’s rise to fame, as she outlifts the strongest man in the world, joins the circus, and eventually finds her place as an icon of the women’s

LIFT OFF!

Katie: The Strongest of the Strong , an HGO-commissioned opera for students and families, is now on tour! We asked composer Faye Chiao and librettist Anton Dudley to tell us the story behind the story.

By Favour Aimufua, Program Coordinator, Community & Learning

suffrage movement. Told through the eyes of journalist Marina Martin, it’s a playful and funny operatic adventure that features a chorus of circus women who take on a multitude of characters. Incorporating puppetry, vaudeville, and immense heart, Katie shows us that strength and beauty come in all shapes and sizes.

What else can you tell us about her?

Born into an Austrian circus family in 1884 as Katie Brumbach, she was a real-life strong woman who, as a street performer, outlifted the World’s Strongest Man, Eugen Sandow. She took both his title and name, rebranding herself as Katie Sandwina. With her husband Max, she toured with P. T. Barnum’s circus, settling in America where she gave birth to a son. She lifted horses, multiple men simultaneously, juggled cannonballs, and did rifle exercises using her husband in place of a rifle! Possessing great influence, Katie became “Sandwina the Suffragette,” a symbol for the women’s suffrage movement.

What inspired you to create this piece?

There isn’t very much information about Katie: a few pictures, posters, newspaper articles, and the like. Yet, she was an

icon in her time. Her story is remarkable, from her taking the title away from the “Strongest Man in the World” to become the “Strongest Person in the World,” to her treasured romance and shocking performance antics with her husband, to her influential political views. Katie surprised and delighted us, and certainly in reading about her life, we could hear music. Very real, she is the stuff of legend: a true opera heroine.

Are you excited about HGO bringing Katie back?

Very much! While we loved the digital release of the show, the opera was conceived to be performed in front of live audiences. This is when opera is at its finest, when the energy of the audience and the performers can meet in a shared space; that’s when the real magic happens.

How did you approach elements of humor in the context of the suffrage movement?

When we laugh, we are open. When we are open, we learn, share, engage, and sympathize… and that’s what live performance is all about.

LET THE TRUTH BE TOLD

HGO will be delving into this season’s theme with partners throughout Houston in the months to come. Here are six things we cannot wait for in 2023-24…

By Alisa Magallón, Associate Director of Programming & Engagement, Community & Learning

THE RETURN OF GIVING VOICE

to Wheeler Avenue Baptist Church, in celebration of Women’s History Month and the Black women of Houston and the opera world who have blazed the trail for so many

THE WORLD PREMIERE

of Meilina Tsui and Melisa Tien’s company-commissioned chamber opera, The Big Swim, at the Asia Society Texas Center, as part of its Lunar New Year celebrations

CULTIVATING EMPATHY THROUGH MUSIC AND STORYTELLING

workshops with partners including Houston Veterans Administration, The Women’s Home, and members of the Coalition for the Homeless

For more information on HGO’s community activities this season, visit HGO.org/ community-and-learning.

MONTHLY RECITALS

in the Crain Garden at Methodist Hospital, in support of people experiencing mental health crises

THE BIRTH OF A NEW SONG CYCLE

from HGO Composer-in-Residence Joel Thompson and poet Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton, set to premiere in 2025 and centered around interviews with Black families, leaders, and Third Ward residents, created in collaboration with Emancipation Park Conservancy and the Houston Public Library’s African American Research Center at the Gregory School

FREE PROGRAMMING

—neighborhood recitals, Storybook Opera, and Sing! Move! Play! workshops—in parks and libraries including Houston Public Library, Harris County Public Library, Levy Park, Discovery Green, and many more!

COMMUNITY AND LEARNING FUNDERS

GUARANTORS

The Brown Foundation, Inc.

William Randolph Hearst Foundation

Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

Sara and Bill Morgan

National Endowment for the Humanities

The Wortham Foundation, Inc.

GRAND UNDERWRITERS

Judy and Richard Agee

City of Houston through the Miller Theatre Advisory Board

Mathilda Cochran

ConocoPhillips

H-E-B

Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo ™

Powell Foundation

UNDERWRITERS

Joan and Stanford Alexander Family Fund

Ruth and Ted Bauer Family Foundation

Shelly Cyprus

Rebecca and Brian Duncan

Rosemary Malbin

Dr. Laura Marsh

Mr. David Montague

National Endowment for the Arts

Vivian L. Smith Foundation

SUPPORTERS

Mr. and Mrs. Robert J. Ardell

Adrienne Bond

Mr. and Mrs. Lester P. Burgess

The Lawrence E. Carlton, MD, Endowment Fund

To learn how to become a philanthropic partner and support HGO's Community & Learning initiatives, contact Alex de Aguiar Reuter at areuter@HGO.org or 713-980-8688.

The Cockrell Family Fund

James J. Drach Endowment Fund

Trish Freeman and Bruce Patterson

Monica Fulton

Rhoda Goldberg

George and Mary Josephine Hamman Foundation

William E. and Natoma Harvey Charitable Trust

Houston Grand Opera Guild

Lee Huber

Ms. Rachel Le and Mr. Lam Hguy

OPERA America

Mr. and Mrs. Michael J. Pancherz

Texas Commission on the Arts

Union Pacific Foundation

The activities of Houston Grand Opera are supported in part by funds provided by the City of Houston through Houston Arts Alliance.

OUT OF CHARACTER

REGINALD SMITH, JR.

By Catherine Matusow

When we reached baritone Reginald Smith, Jr. over Zoom one recent morning, his voice was a little gravelly—what he called his “morning-after Scarpia

The evening prior, he’d taken the stage at The Santa Fe Opera to perform as the villain in still waking up. “Scarpia is a wonderful role,” he shared, “but it’s dramatically exhausting as well as vocally.”

It was Smith’s first outing as the character, which made for an incredible full-circle moment. The first opera Smith ever saw, as a high school student in Atlanta, was Tosca, in a production starring Donnie Ray Albert as Scarpia. That moment changed his life.

“I didn’t know Black people sang opera, not ones that were alive,” Smith remembers. “I’d heard of Marian Anderson and Paul Robeson, and I knew of Leontyne Price from school. But when I went to see the Atlanta Opera, and I saw this regal, elegant Black man with this enormous, gorgeous voice, it really ignited a fire within me. I said, Wow, maybe I could do this

Do this, he absolutely could. Smith would go on to become a Grammy and Emmy award-winning star; he would represent the United States at the BBC Cardiff Singer of the World competition; and Albert would become his friend and mentor.

Along the way, he would establish a deep and abiding relationship with HGO, training with the company’s Sarah and Ernest Butler Houston Grand Opera Studio, performing with the company more than a dozen times, even falling in love with Houston and settling here.

While in Santa Fe, Smith was preparing to join HGO again this fall, looking forward to performing a comic role, as our Falstaff. Fully awake now and sparkling with charm, he told us more…

Opera Cues: You did Falstaff early in your career, but it’s been a while. Are you using your time in Santa Fe to prepare?

Reginald Smith, Jr.: As I sit here, it’s literally right here next to me. Falstaff is never far away. We have time between performances, which will allow me to go back to my score, do some score study, coach it. It’s great having people like [HGO Principal Coach] Peter Pasztor here in Santa Fe. Being able to work on music together is fantastic.

Blake Denson is here, too; he’s also in this production of Tosca. We have so many Ford and Falstaff scenes that we can work on before we even get to Houston. I’ve seen Blake come up through the ranks, from

your head and say, Oh my God, this guy is a mess. But he still has some rank and some clout.

The thing that I love about Falstaff is that he's so complex. He has moments where he bursts into anger. He has moments where he’s wooing and charming. He has moments where he’s sort of ribbing and trying to get at the other guys, Pistol and Bardolph. He’s just a very complete character. That’s what makes it exciting, and also challenging.

OC: Are you excited to perform the role?

RS: Yes! Most of the time, I play villains and fathers. If I’m not somebody’s dad, I’m somebody’s villain. With Falstaff, I get to be fun and funny!

OC: Tell us about the famous fugue at the end of the opera.

RS: Oh, lordy. (laughs) One of the things that’s really amazing about Giuseppe Verdi is that he was already known as Verdi the composer, the giant, the Italian opera composer… And much like our dearly departed Carlisle Floyd who did Prince of Players, he said, Well, since I’m still around, I guess I’ll write another opera (laughs) Which is exactly what Mr. Floyd told me, by the way, when I asked him about his inspiration for writing Prince of Players

The baritone as Marullo in Rigoletto at HGO (2014)

Photo credit: Lynn Lane

The thing that’s so amazing about Falstaff is that it’s a conglomeration of all of Verdi’s geniuses, from dramatic moments to hysterical moments to a 13-voice fugue known as (singing) “Tutto nel mondo é burla. L’uom é nato burlone, burlone, burlone.” And it’s amazing, because every single character has a different line, all the people in the chorus have a different line, and trying to rehearse it individually— sometimes you’re pulling your hair out because it doesn’t make sense. But when you put it all together, it lines up perfectly. And it’s like, how did you even think to come up with such an amazing fugue?

It’s a fantastic moment of musical genius, in addition to bringing the story to a fun and dramatic close. But when you analyze it musically, you think, how did this man come up with this? It’s beautiful. The big finale—the big finale of his writing, even—is this lovely and amazing fugue

OC: Who encouraged you early on?

RS: I grew up with all types of music, not just traditional Black gospel music, which I did, but jazz and choral music. My mother went to Morris Brown College, which is in the Atlanta University Center of historically Black colleges

I grew up with that sort of Black excellence and musical excellence. I have always been a choral music fan and fanatic. I started choir when I was in second grade, and I had my first solo in the spiritual, “Do, Lord, Remember Me” in front of the whole school.

I was fortunate that when I went to the performing arts high school in Atlanta, DeKalb School of the Arts, I studied with fantastic teachers, and I had people that saw something in me that I didn’t realize was there, that I didn’t see in myself. My goal was always to be a choral music educator. I always sang because I love singing. It never dawned on me, really, that I could have a career performing, not as a way of making a living full-time.

I’m blessed and fortunate that other people convinced me to pursue a career in singing. I went to the University of Kentucky to study vocal performance and choral music education. And I did complete my studies. I did my student teaching in Cologne, Germany. If I hadn’t gotten into opera, I would have been a stellar high school choir teacher

OC: When you saw that production of Tosca back in high school, would you have ever imagined that one day, you would be playing Scarpia?

RS: No. And I take it as a personal honor and responsibility whenever I get on the stage to show people—all people,

but especially young African American students—that it is possible. This is something that you can do. And hopefully one day, I inspire somebody else to join the ranks of crazy opera singers of the world.

Of course, Donnie Ray Albert is no stranger to audiences in Houston, most notably for his portrayal of Porgy that won Houston a Tony Award and a Grammy. But Donnie Ray Albert has done, what, 12 different roles at HGO? Including, most recently, he was the father in Romeo and Juliet

And I’ve had the opportunity to work with him, to coach different things with him, and to thank him profusely for being a representation because I didn’t know Black people sang opera. I consider it an honor to do this role after being so inspired by Mr. Albert I don’t know! I can’t call him Donnie Ray to his face! I know he tells me to, but I still can’t do it.

OC: You can see the continuity. Donnie Ray Albert mentored you, and earlier you mentioned supporting Blake Denson.

RS: When you’ve been blessed, I feel that it is your responsibility to be a blessing to others, because that’s the point. When you’ve been given a God-given gift and talent, it’s not for you to sit on. It’s for you to share and to hopefully extend a hand to help others.

OC: Tell us about your time with the Butler Studio.

RS: The majority of what I have gained in terms of career experience and my career sort of skyrocketing is because of my time in the Studio. The opportunities that were afforded to me to work with so many extraordinary artists on stage—conductors, coaches, diction teachers, language specialists—is something that you really don’t get at even the major conservatories and universities. You get a lot of hands-on instruction, and you get a lot of stage time, which is paramount… It really opened my eyes to things that I needed to do and be better at, but also, the vast possibilities of this career. I’m very grateful.

OC: How did you pick Houston as your home base?

RS: I moved to Houston in 2013 when I joined the Studio, and I liked it so much that I decided to stick around. The thing I love about Houston is that it’s a beautiful city. The people are very warm and inviting and friendly. It has a fantastic art scene between the symphony, the ballet, the theaters including the Ensemble Theater, all the musicals that come through, Mercury Baroque—it’s just outrageous. The Houston Master Chorale. All the art museums. And, of course, I am a huge, huge baseball fan. I will be an Atlanta Brave forever and ever, but I do love my Houston Astros. ∎

Smith performing in the 2014 Butler Studio Showcase

The Impresarios Circle is Houston Grand Opera’s premier donor recognition society. These vanguard supporters who provide annual support of at least $100,000 are instrumental to HGO’s success. For information, please contact Greg Robertson, chief philanthropy officer, at 713-546-0274 or GRobertson@HGO.org.

JUDY AND RICHARD AGEE

HGO subscribers for more than two decades, Judy and Dick are ardent believers in the power of storytelling through words and music. They partnered with the Archdiocese of GalvestonHouston Inner-City Catholic Schools to expand student access to HGO Community and Learning programs. Judy and Dick, the founder and chairman of Wapiti Energy LLC and Bayou Well Holdings Company LLC, also support mainstage productions. Dick is a member of the HGO Board of Directors.

ROBIN ANGLY AND MILES SMITH

HGO subscribers Robin and Miles joined the Founders Council in 2010. The company is honored to have Robin as a senior member of the HGO Board of Directors and as a member of HGO’s Laureate Society. The couple is very familiar with the view from the HGO stage as well—both are former singers in the HGO Chorus. Robin and Miles have been donors to HGO special events, the Young Artists Vocal Academy, and HGO’s Ring cycle. They are charter members of the Impresarios Circle and generously underwrite a mainstage production each season.

THE BROWN FOUNDATION, INC.

The Brown Foundation, Inc., established in 1951 by Herman and Margarett Root Brown and George R. and Alice Pratt Brown, has been a treasured partner of HGO since 1984. Based in Houston, the Foundation distributes funds principally for education, community service, and the arts, especially the visual and performing arts. HGO is tremendously grateful for The Brown Foundation’s leadership support, which has been critical to the company’s unprecedented growth and success in recent years. The Brown Foundation was among the lead contributors to HGO’s Hurricane Harvey and COVID-19 recovery efforts.

SARAH AND ERNEST BUTLER

HGO subscribers for over 35 years, Sarah and Ernest made the largest gift to HGO in company history in 2023, creating a new fund within the HGO Endowment valued at $22 million and becoming the naming partner for the Sarah and Ernest Butler Houston Grand Opera Studio. They are also the lead underwriters for the company’s digital artistic programming, and have generously endowed three chairs at HGO: those of HGO Artistic and Music Director Patrick Summers, Chorus Director Richard Bado, and HGO Orchestra Concertmaster Denise Tarrant. Ernest and Sarah reside in Austin and are longtime supporters of Ballet Austin, Austin Opera, Austin

Symphony Orchestra, the Texas Cultural Trust, and the University of Texas Butler School of Music, which has carried their name since 2008. Sarah and Ernest are world travelers, and they never miss an opportunity to see opera in the cities they visit.

ANNE AND ALBERT CHAO

Anne and Albert have been subscribers and supporters of HGO for the past two decades. While serving as president and CEO of Westlake Corporation, Albert finds time for numerous cultural causes. He is a member of the HGO Board of Directors and was the co-chair of Inspiring Performance—The Campaign for Houston Grand Opera. Over the years, the Chaos have sponsored HGO special events, the Butler Studio, Song of Houston, and mainstage productions. The couple has also supported the HGO Endowment. In April 2023 they chaired the Opera Ball.

LOUISE G. CHAPMAN

Louise Chapman of Corpus Christi, Texas, a longtime supporter of HGO, is a member of the HGO Board of Directors. Louise’s late husband, John O. Chapman, was a south Texas agricultural businessman and philanthropist. In addition to HGO, the Chapmans have supported numerous organizations in health, education, and the arts, including Texas A&M University, the Corpus Christi Symphony, and the Art Museum of South Texas. Louise and HGO Trustee Connie Dyer have known each other since they were college roommates at The University of Texas.

THE ROBERT AND JANE CIZIK FOUNDATION

The Cizik family name is synonymous with passion, devotion, and service to the people of Houston. The Ciziks have always been associated with hard work, high achievement, inspirational leadership, and love for their family. Survived by his wife, Jane, Robert Cizik spearheaded the fundraising and building of HGO’s home, the Wortham Theater Center. The Robert and Jane Cizik Foundation gives generously to many educational institutions and charitable organizations, including UTHealth, Harvard University, the University of Houston, and the University of Connecticut. In 2017, the School of Nursing at UTHealth was re-named the Jane and Robert Cizik School of Nursing at UTHealth in recognition of the family’s dedicated support.

Robin Angly, Chair

MATHILDA COCHRAN

Mathilda is a native of New Orleans and a long-time resident of Houston. She is a retired museum educator, having served for many years as Manager of the Docent and Tour Program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, as well as a volunteer with Taping for the Blind, Inc. She and her late husband, Mike, created the Cochran Family Professorship in Earth and Environmental Sciences to support Tulane University’s School of Science and Engineering. Mathilda currently serves as a member of the HGO Board of Directors and is chair of the Community and Learning Committee. She has been an HGO subscriber since the 1986-87 season.

CONOCOPHILLIPS

For over 40 years, ConocoPhillips has supported various programs at HGO, from special events to mainstage productions, including a long-standing tradition of supporting HGO’s season-opening operas. In 2009, the company gave a major multi-year grant to establish ConocoPhillips New Initiatives, a far-reaching program that allows the Opera to develop new and innovative education and community collaboration programs. Kelly Rose, general counsel and SVP, serves on the HGO Board of Directors.

MOLLY AND JIM CROWNOVER

Molly and Jim have been HGO subscribers for over 30 years and are members of the Impresarios Circle and Laureate Society. Jim has been a member of HGO’s Board of Directors since 1987, including service as chairman from 2016-18 and on the Executive, Governance, Development, and Finance Committees. In 1998, Jim retired from a 30-year career with McKinsey & Company, Inc. and has served on myriad corporate and non-profit boards including Rice University (past board chair), United Way (past campaign chair), and most recently as M.D. Anderson Foundation President. Molly continues to serve on the Butler Studio and Special Events Committees. She also serves on the Advisory Board of The Shepherd Society at Rice University and on the Houston Ballet Board of Trustees (past Executive Committee and Ballet Ball chair). Molly and Jim have chaired HGO's Concert of Arias, been honorees at Concert of Arias and Opening Night Dinner, and chaired Opening Night 2022.

THE CULLEN FOUNDATION

For more than three decades, The Cullen Foundation has been a vital member of the HGO family. Established in 1947, the Foundation has more than a half-century history of giving generously to education, health care, and the arts in Texas, primarily in the Greater Houston area. The Opera is very grateful for the Foundation’s longstanding leadership support of HGO’s Family and Holiday Opera Series, as well as special support for HGO’s COVID-19 recovery efforts.

THE CULLEN TRUST FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS

The Cullen Trust for the Performing Arts has been a lead underwriter of HGO’s mainstage season for nearly 30 years. The Trust was established from assets of The Cullen Foundation to specifically benefit Texas performing arts institutions, particularly those within the Greater Houston area. In recent years, The Cullen Trust has provided lead support for memorable productions including HGO’s Family and Holiday Opera Series, and made a leadership contribution to HGO’s Hurricane Harvey recovery fund, as well as a generous gift to HGO’s COVID-19 recovery efforts.

CONNIE DYER

Connie Dyer has been an important member of the HGO family for decades. Connie loves HGO Opening Night festivities and the Concert of Arias. She is a leadership donor, Trustee, and a member of the Laureate Society and the Founders Council for Artistic Excellence. With her late husband Byron, she has hosted receptions for HGO Patrons in their beautiful home in Santa Fe. They were early and enthusiastic underwriters for HGO’s Seeking the Human Spirit initiative, and most recently Connie made a grand grand guarantor pledge for HGO’s COVID Relief Campaign. HGO Board Member Louise Chapman and Connie were college roommates at the University of Texas, Austin.

FROST BANK

Frost Bank has been a supporter of HGO for over a decade, helping bring to life some of the world’s most treasured operas, as well as supporting new works including the 2019 world premiere of The Phoenix. Since Frost’s founding in 1868, the bank has invested in the communities it serves through hard work, customer service, and support of the arts, education, economic development, and health and human services. David LePori, Regional President, serves on the HGO Board of Directors.

DRS. LIZ GRIMM AND JACK ROTH

HGO subscribers since the 2013–14 season, Liz and Jack have both committed themselves to cancer research and patient care through their work at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. Jack is a member of the HGO Board of Directors and serves as Butler Studio Committee Chair. Liz and Jack were generous underwriters of HGO’s historic, first-ever Ring cycle and lead supporters of HGO’s German repertoire, including Elektra. Additionally, Liz and Jack chaired the 2018 Opera Ball and the 2022 Concert of Arias.

NANCY HAYWOOD

Long-time Trustee Nancy Haywood loves HGO, and her particular passion is the Butler Studio and supporting young artists. Her enthusiasm is infectious. This season Nancy is

underwriting second-year Butler Studio artist Erin Wagner. Her love for supporting young artists goes beyond HGO to the Houston Boy Choir, where she is one of their most ardent benefactors and Board Members. Nancy is a member of HGO’s Butler Studio Committee, Philanthropy Committee, and the Laureate Society. Most recently, she made a guarantor pledge for HGO’s COVID Relief Campaign. Nancy and her late husband, Dr. Ted Haywood, approached every opera performance as a “date night.” Ted Haywood was a prince.

MATT HEALEY

Matt Healey is Vice President of Finance and Planning at Cheniere Energy, responsible for budgeting, capital planning, forecasting, and capital raising. He also owns El Segundo Swim Club, a full-service bar and swimming pool in the historic Second Ward. Matt became a huge fan of HGO the moment the curtains opened on the water tank Rhinemaidens in Das Rheingold in 2014. Although he has seen the Ring cycle in Chicago, New York, and San Francisco, the HGO production is by far his favorite. A passionate fan of German repertoire, he underwrote Salome in the 2022-23 season and is underwriting Parsifal this season.

WILLIAM RANDOLPH HEARST FOUNDATION

The William Randolph Hearst Foundation is a national philanthropic resource for organizations working in the fields of culture, education, health, and social services. The Foundation identifies and funds outstanding nonprofits to ensure that people of all backgrounds in the United States have the opportunity to build healthy, productive, and inspiring lives. A dedicated supporter of HGO, the Foundation is a leading advocate for the Opera's Community and Learning initiatives. The continued support from the Foundation makes it possible for Houstonians of all ages to explore, engage, and learn through the inspiring art of opera.

H-E-B

For over 115 years, H-E-B has contributed to worthy causes throughout Texas and Mexico, a tradition proudly maintained today. And for over 20 years, H-E-B has been a lead supporter of the Opera's arts education programs for Houston area students. H-E-B’s partnership helps over 70,000 young people experience the magic of opera each season. Always celebrating Houston's cultural diversity, H-E-B helped make possible 2022's Monkey and Francine in the City of Tigers and 2023's Giving Voice concert.

HOUSTON GRAND OPERA ENDOWMENT, INC.

Established and incorporated in 1982, the Houston Grand Opera Endowment (HGOE) is a vital financial management tool that ensures HGO has a reliable, regular source of income. Today, the Endowment contains over 50 named funds, both unrestricted and restricted, and annually distributes 4.5 percent of the Endowment’s average market value to HGO,

making it the largest single annual funder of the Opera. HGOE leadership includes Chair Marianne Kah, Senior Chair Yolanda Knull, and several members of the HGO Board of Directors.

HOUSTON METHODIST

For over ten years, Houston Grand Opera has partnered with Houston Methodist, the official health care provider for HGO.

Houston Methodist’s Center for Performing Arts Medicine (CPAM) is the only center of its kind in the country, comprising a specialized group of more than 100 physicians working collaboratively to address the specific demands placed upon performing artists. In addition to the first-rate medical care CPAM provides HGO artists, Houston Methodist also generously supports HGO’s mainstage season and partners frequently on Community and Learning collaborations. HGO is fortunate to have Dr. Warren Ellsworth and Dr. Apurva Thekdi serve as Houston Methodist’s corporate trustees.

HUMPHREYS FOUNDATION

Based in Liberty, Texas, Humphreys Foundation has been a major underwriter of HGO’s mainstage season since 1980. Geraldine Davis Humphreys (d. 1961), a member of the pioneer Hardin family of Liberty, Texas, bequeathed her estate to Humphreys Foundation, which was formally established in 1959. The Foundation provides support for performing arts in Texas and college scholarship funding for students in the arts. Linda Bertman, Louis Paine, and Jeff Paine serve as trustees of Humphreys Foundation. Last season, the Foundation supported two family-friendly productions, El Milagro del Recuerdo and The Marriage of Figaro

ELIZABETH AND RICHARD HUSSEINI

We like to think that HGO helped “set the stage” for Elizabeth and Richard Husseini's love story. When a set malfunction at the end of the first act of HGO’s The Flying Dutchman forced Maestro to re-start the opera from the top, the two seatmates bonded in their shared delight that they got to hear more Wagner! The two got engaged one year later (at HGO, of course). Richard is a tax partner at Kirkland & Ellis, a generous HGO corporate supporter, and serves on both the HGO Board of Directors and the HGO Endowment Board. Elizabeth retired from Baker Botts as a corporate and securities partner and devotes her attention to family and community matters, including Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston, Preservation Houston, the Junior League, and River Oaks Baptist School, which the Husseinis' two sons attend. Enthusiastic supporters of the young artists and alumni of the Butler Studio, the couple chaired the 2019 Concert of Arias. During the 2022-23 season, the Husseinis generously underwrote the U.S. premiere of The Wreckers as well as Butler Studio alumna Tamara Wilson's much-anticipated role debut in the titular role of Tosca

DONNA KAPLAN AND RICHARD LYDECKER

Richard Lydecker has been an HGO subscriber and supporter for more than three decades.  He has great passion for opera,

especially Wagner, and he and Donna were underwriters for HGO’s Ring cycle. They are also special events sponsors, supporting Opera Ball and Concert of Arias.

CLAIRE LIU AND JOE GREENBERG

Claire and Joe have subscribed to HGO for many seasons and are members of HGO’s Founders Council for Artistic Excellence. Claire assumed the role of Chair of the HGO Board of Directors in August 2022. She is newly retired from LyondellBassell Industries where she led the corporate finance team, and was formerly a managing director with Bank of America. Joe is founder and CEO of Alta Resources, L.L.C., a private company involved in the development of shale oil and gas resources in North America. Claire and Joe support many organizations, with particular emphasis on educational organizations including YES Prep and Beatrice Mayes Charter School. An avid runner, Claire has completed a marathon in all 50 states.

BETH

MADISON

Beth has been an HGO subscriber for more than two decades. HGO has had the honor of her support since 2004. Past chair of the HGO Board of Directors, she is a senior director of the HGO Board of Directors, serves on the Butler Studio Committee, and is an active member of HGO’s Founders Council. She was the honoree at the 2017 Concert of Arias. Beth generously supports the Butler Studio, special events, and mainstage operas. Beth has been inducted into the Greater Houston Women’s Hall of Fame and serves on the University of Houston System Board of Regents.

LAURA AND BRAD MCWILLIAMS

HGO subscribers for 35 years, Laura and Brad have been passionate advocates for HGO.  A longtime Trustee, Laura has served on the HGO Finance Committee, chaired the Annual Fund Drive, and serves on the Laureate Society Council.  Laura and Brad’s generosity has impacted almost every area of the company including HGO Special Events – they chaired the 32nd Annual Concert of Arias in 2020.  They most recently created the McWilliams Fund for Artistic Excellence to underwrite HGO’s mainstage operas for the 2022-23, 2023-24 and 2024-25 seasons.

PAUL MARSDEN

Paul Marsden became an HGO Trustee in the 2020-21 season and generously increased his support to join the Impresarios Circle in late 2021. A member of the HGO Board of Directors, Paul is President of Bechtel’s Energy global business unit in Houston and has served in key leadership roles for over two decades, dating back to his start with the company in London in 1995.

THE ROBERT AND JANICE MCNAIR FOUNDATION

Janice and the late Bob McNair, longtime HGO subscribers and supporters, are well known for their incredible philanthropy and for bringing the NFL back to Houston. Bob was a former chair of the HGO Board of Directors (1995-97). Through the family’s passionate support of students, young entrepreneurs, medical research, and the community, The Robert and Janice McNair Foundation is transforming some of the biggest challenges our nation faces today into the solutions of tomorrow. As the lead supporter of HGO’s Family Opera Series, the McNair Foundation makes it possible for thousands of students and families to experience shorter-length family-friendly operas and musicals each year.

M. D. ANDERSON FOUNDATION

The M. D. Anderson Foundation has provided general operating support to HGO for more than 30 years. The Foundation was established in 1936 by Monroe Dunaway Anderson, whose company, Anderson, Clayton and Co., was the world’s largest cotton merchant. While the Foundation started the Texas Medical Center and was instrumental in bringing to it one of the premier cancer centers in the world, the Foundation’s trustees also looked to improve the wellness of communities through the arts. HGO is privileged to have such a longstanding and committed partner in enhancing the quality of life for all Houstonians.

SARA AND BILL MORGAN

Sara and Bill have been supporting HGO since 2002. Sara is a co-founder of the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, where she currently serves on the board. Bill is a co-founder of the Kinder Morgan companies and the retired vice chairman and president of Kinder Morgan, Inc., and Kinder Morgan Energy Partners, LP. The Morgans support Community and Learning initiatives, HGO’s special events, and mainstage productions, including the Holiday Opera Series. HGO is thrilled to have Sara serve on the HGO Board of Directors and as a member and past chair of the Community and Learning Committee.

NOVUM ENERGY/MARCIA AND ALFREDO VILAS

Founder and President of Novum Energy, Alfredo Vilas serves on the HGO Board of Directors. He is a passionate lover of opera and together with his wife Marcia chaired HGO’s unforgettable “Cielito Lindo” Opera Ball in 2019. The Vilases and Novum Energy have generously supported many operas over the past decade, including all three of HGO’s celebrated mariachi operas, and were proud underwriters for the 2022 production of El Milagro del Recuerdo

ALLYSON PRITCHETT

Allyson Pritchett, a member of the HGO Board of Directors, is the Founder & CEO of Bodka Creek Capital, a Houston-based real estate private equity firm with over $100M in assets under management. She holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a Bachelor’s in Applied Mathematics & Archaeology from Harvard University. After attending her first opera at HGO in 2021 (Carmen), she joined the Young Patrons Circle and quickly demonstrated her passion for opera by underwriting Angel Blue in La traviata the following year.

JILL AND ALLYN RISLEY

Jill and Allyn Risley have been HGO subscribers since the 2003-04 season and are members of the company’s Founders Council. Allyn and Jill have been key influencers of HGO programs for many years, with special affection for our esteemed Butler Studio. They co-sponsor Butler Studio Artist Eric Taylor and faculty member Dr. Stephen King, Director of Vocal Instruction. Allyn is Chairman of Gaztransport & Technigaz (GTT) North America, an engineering company specializing in liquid gas containment systems using cryogenics. Allyn served as Chair of the HGO Board of Directors from 2020 to August 2022 and currently serves as Senior Chair.

GLEN ROSENBAUM

Glen Rosenbaum is a Senior Partner of Tax at Vinson & Elkins. As part of his broad-based tax practice Glen works on behalf of civic and cultural organizations, for which he handles formation, obtaining of tax-exempt status, and various corporate, tax, and business matters, some on a pro bono basis. Glen received his B.B.A. from the University of Texas and his J.D. from the University of Texas School of Law. He is a Board member of the Texas Taxpayers and Research Association and serves on its Executive Committee, as well as President and Board member of Houston Food Bank Endowment, and a Trustee of the Nathan J. Klein Fund. Glen is a member of HGO’s Board of Directors, serving as its Chairman from 2009-11, and was a member of the Finance and Philanthropy Committees. As a long-serving Board member, Glen led a team of Vinson & Elkins lawyers from 1983-87 that represented HGO in connection with the negotiation and drafting of the various development and operating agreements relating to the Wortham Center and the Wortham Center Operating Company. These agreements remain in effect today. During the 2022-23 season, Glen co-chaired the recordbreaking 35th Annual Concert of Arias

SHELL USA, INC.

Shell USA, Inc. is a leader in the Houston arts community, supporting HGO for over 40 years. Shell USA, Inc.’s leadership support makes opera more accessible to everyone through the NEXUS Initiative for Affordability and inspires young minds with STEM-aligned arts education opportunities like our annual

Opera Camps. Shell USA, Inc. was also a major supporter of HGO’s Hurricane Harvey recovery. HGO is honored to have Selda Gunsel, president, Shell Global Solutions, as a member of the HGO Board of Directors, and Christos Angelides, head of energy transition integration, as a Trustee.

DIAN AND HARLAN STAI

Harlan, a member of the HGO Board of Directors, and Dian are charter members of HGO’s Founders Council for Artistic Excellence, and their leadership support includes mainstage productions, the Butler Studio, the HGO Endowment, and special events. The Stais have also sponsored Butler Studio artists and they host annual recitals featuring Butler Studio artists at Mansefeldt, their renowned Fredericksburg ranch. HGO was privileged to recognize Dian and Harlan as the honorees of Opening Night 2008 and the 2014 Concert of Arias

TEXAS COMMISSION ON THE ARTS

The mission of the Texas Commission on the Arts (TCA) is to advance our state economically and culturally by investing in creative projects and programs. TCA supports a diverse and innovative arts community in the state, throughout the nation, and internationally by providing resources to enhance economic development, arts education, cultural tourism, and artist sustainability initiatives. Over the years, TCA has provided invaluable support to many HGO projects, including mainstage productions and Community and Learning education initiatives.

JOHN G. TURNER & JERRY G. FISCHER

John and Jerry, based in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, travel around the world to experience the best that opera has to offer. HGO subscribers and donors for over a decade, the couple’s leadership support of Wagner’s Ring cycle (2014–17) was the largest gift ever made to HGO for a single production. John, a shareholder at Turner Industries Group, is a senior member of the HGO Board of Directors and past chair of the Butler Studio Committee. Jerry is a board member of Baton Rouge Symphony Orchestra. In recent years, John and Jerry have supported HGO mainstage productions, the Butler Studio, and special events. They are members of the Founders Council for Artistic Excellence, and John is a member of HGO’s Laureate Society.

VEER VASISHTA

Veer Vasishta is a passionate lover of opera and a proud member of the HGO Board of Directors and Impresarios Circle. Following his education in mechanical engineering and a successful career in finance, Veer co-founded a technology firm based in Montreal, Canada, with staff in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, the U.K., and Asia. He trained as a classical guitarist after a short time playing violin and in a rock band in high school. Veer began been attending HGO performances as soon as he arrived in Houston.

VINSON & ELKINS LLP

HGO has been privileged to have the support of international law firm Vinson & Elkins LLP for 40 years. For more than 100 years, Vinson & Elkins LLP has been deeply committed to empowering the communities in which it serves. It has enriched the cultural vibrancy of Houston by supporting HGO through in-kind legal services and contributions to special events and mainstage productions, including Tosca in spring 2023. The Opera is honored to have two Vinson & Elkins LLP partners serve on its board of directors: from left, Christopher Bacon and Glen A. Rosenbaum.

MARGARET ALKEK WILLIAMS

Margaret, a longtime singer, possesses a deep affinity for all music, and especially opera, supporting HGO for over 30 years. Currently, Margaret continues her parents’ legacy as chairman of their foundation, where her son Charles A. Williams serves as president. HGO is humbled by Margaret’s incredible generosity and dedication to the company, both as an individual donor and through her family’s foundation. She has endowed the Margaret Alkek Williams Chair, held by HGO General Director Khori Dastoor, and is a member of HGO’s Laureate Society. A valued member of the HGO Board of Directors, Margaret was the honoree of the 2009 Opera Ball and chairman of the 2014 Ball, and she generously chaired the 2018 Hurricane Harvey benefit Concert HGO and Plácido: Coming Home!

THE WORTHAM FOUNDATION, INC.

In the 1980s, the Wortham Foundation contributed $20 million to lead the capital campaign for the Wortham Theater Center, guided by businessman Gus S. Wortham’s early recognition of the vital role of the arts in making Houston an appealing place to live and work. During their lifetimes, Gus and his wife, Lyndall, were dedicated to improving the lives of Houstonians. The Foundation continues to support the Opera through the Wortham Foundation Permanent Endowment and generous annual operating support. This leadership support has been vital to HGO’s growth and commitment to excellence. The Wortham Foundation’s support of HGO’s Hurricane Harvey recovery helped to bring the company back home, and its special support of HGO's COVID-19 recovery efforts helped us come back stronger than ever.

LYNN WYATT

Lynn’s generosity touches every aspect of HGO. She is a Lifetime Trustee of HGO and serves as the Vice Chairman of the HGO Board of Directors. She chaired HGO’s Golden Jubilee Gala in 2005. Oscar Wyatt endowed The Lynn Wyatt Great Artist Fund in 2010, honoring Lynn’s service to the company and dedication to bringing the world’s best operatic artists to HGO, and she was the honoree at the 2010 Opera Ball. Lynn and Oscar have been lead supporters of a number of HGO productions and programs, including the multiyear company-wide initiative Seeking the Human Spirit.

Houston Grand Opera Trustees and Patrons Circle members support the Opera with annual donations of $10,000 or $5,000, respectively, and make possible the incredible work of HGO. Trustees and Patrons enjoy many benefits at the Opera, including Masterson Green Room privileges during performance intermissions, behind-the-scenes experiences, personalized ticket service, two tickets to all open dress rehearsals, Opera Guild membership, a discount on Opera Guild Boutique purchases, and much more. For information on joining as a Trustee or Patron, please contact David Krohn, director of philanthropy, at 713-980-8685 or DKrohn@HGO.org.

CHAIR, DONOR ENGAGEMENT COMMITTEE

Ms. Gwyneth Campbell, Chair, Donor Engagement Committee

TRUSTEE—$10,000 OR MORE

Mr. William J. Altenloh and Dr. Susan Saurage-Altenloh

Chris and Michelle Angelides

Christopher Bacon and Craig Miller

Kate Baker

Blanche S. and Robert C. Bast, Jr., MD

Mr. Jack Bell

Drs. Robert S. and Nancy Benjamin

Stephanie and Dom Beveridge

Ms. Susan Bloome

Adrienne Bond

Nancy and Walt Bratic

Mr. Stephen Brossart and Mr. Gerrod George

Dr. Janet Bruner

Mollie and Wayne Brunetti

Elise Bungo and Eric Rodriguez

Mr. and Mrs. Lester P. Burgess

Mr. and Mrs. Richard Burleson

Mrs. Carol Butler

Drs. Ian and Patricia Butler

Ms. Gwyneth Campbell and Mr. Joseph L. Campbell

Patricia and Jess Carnes

Dr. Peter Chang and Hon. Theresa Chang

Mr. Robert N. Chanon

Mr. Anthony Chapman

Cheryl and Michael Clancy

Mr. and Mrs. Robert L. Clarke

Mr. and Mrs. Robert Collier

Dr. Laurence Corash and Ms. Michele Corash

Julie and Bert Cornelison

Mr. Robert L. Cook and Mrs. Giovanna Imperia

Jayne and Peter Davis

Anna M. Dean

Dr. and Mrs. Roupen Dekmezian

Ms. Elisabeth DeWitts

Valerie and Tracy Dieterich

Jeanette and John DiFilippo

Dr. and Mrs. William F. Donovan

Johanna and Stephen Donson

Joanne and David Dorenfeld

Mr. James Dorough-Lewis and Mr. Jacob Carr

Dr. Allen Deustch and Mrs. Luci Runte

Anna and Brad Eastman

Mr. Bob Ellis

Mary Ann and Larry Faulkner

Carol Lay Fletcher

Mr. John E. Frantz

Caroline Freeman

Trish Freeman and Bruce Patterson

Monica Fulton

Gina and Scott Gaille

Dr. and Mrs. Ronald Galfione

Mr. and Mrs. Scott J. Garber

Gerard and Christine Gaynor

Dr. and Mrs. David P. Gill

Mrs. Geraldine C. Gill

Mr. Wesley Goble and Mr. Barry Liss

Sandy and Lee Godfrey

Ms. Dianne L. Gross

Ms. Julia Gwaltney

Mr. and Mrs. Melvyn Hetzel

Rosalie and William M. Hitchcock

Dr. Patricia Holmes

Lee M. Huber

Ms. Sarah Johnson

Ann and Stephen Kaufman

Mr. Mark Klitzke and Dr. Angela Chen

Mr. and Mrs. William H. Knull III

Mr. and Mrs. Frederick Kolb

Ann Koster

Elizabeth and Bill Kroger

Mr. and Mrs. Blair Labatt

Mr. and Mrs. Randall B. Lake

Dr. and Mrs. Ernst Leiss

Ms. Bernice Lindstrom

Mrs. Marilyn Lummis

Ms. Michele Malloy

Ms. Diane M. Marcinek

Renee Margolin

Mary Marquardsen

Mr. R. Davis Maxey

Dorothy McCaine

Ms. Janice McNeil

Jan and Nathan Meehan

Ginger Menown

Sharyn and Jerry Metcalf

Chadd Mikulin and Amanda Lenertz

Dr. Indira Mysorekar Mills and Dr. Jason Mills

Dr. and Mrs. William E. Mitch

Marsha L. Montemayor

Mr. and Mrs. Shahin Naghavi

Erik B. Nelson and Terry R. Brandhorst

John Newton and Peggy Cramer

Susan and Edward Osterberg

Mr. and Mrs. Michael J. Pancherz

Susan and Ward Pennebaker

Mr. Mark Poag and Dr. Mary Poag

The Radoff Family

Dr. Angela Rechichi-Apollo

Carol F. Relihan

Mr. Serge Ribot

Ed and Janet Rinehart

Mr. and Mrs. Walter Ritchie

Mr. and Mrs. David Rowan

Mr. Mike Rydin

Adel and Jason Sander

Judy Sauer

Mrs. Helen P. Shaffer

Hinda Simon

Ms. Janet Sims

Diana Strassmann and Jeffrey Smisek

Mr. and Mrs. George Sneed

Bruce Stein

Kathy and Richard Stout

Mr. Minas and Dr. Jennifer Tektiridis

Ann Tornyos

Mr. and Mrs. John Untereker

Mr. and Mrs. Robert N. Wakefield

Mr. and Mrs. Jay Watkins

Mr. and Mrs. K.C. Weiner

Mr. and Mrs. C. Clifford Wright, Jr.

Mr. Hugh Zhang and Ms. Lulu Tan

1 Anonymous

YOUNG TRUSTEE—$5,000 OR MORE

Emily Bivona and Ryan Manser

Mr. Anthony Chapman

Mr. and Mrs. Damian Gill

Meredith and Joseph Gomez

Ms. Kathleen Henry

Ms. Ellen Liu and Ms. Ilana Walder-Biesanz

Mr. Andrew Pappas

Drs. Mauricio Perillo and Luján Stasevicius

Lauren Randle

Mr. and Mrs. Daniel Ritter

Dr. Nico Roussel and Ms. Teresa Procter

Jennifer Salcich

Mr. Michael Steeves

Ms. Stella Tang and Mr. Steven Tang

Dr. Yin Yiu

1 Anonymous

NATIONAL TRUSTEE—$5,000 OR MORE

Ms. Alissa Adkins, Corpus Christi, TX

Ms. Jacqueline S. Akins, San Antonio, TX

Mrs. Estella Hollin-Avery, Fredericksburg, TX

Jorge Bernal and Andrea Maher, Bogota, Colombia

Mr. Tom Burley and Mr. Michael Arellano, Philadelphia, PA

Dr. Dennis Berthold and Dr. Pamela Matthews, College Station, TX

Mr. Richard E. Boner and Ms. Susan Pryor, Austin, TX

Mrs. Carol W. Byrd, Wetumka, OK

Mr. Bryce Cotner, Austin, TX

Dr. Thomas S. DeNapoli and Mr. Mark Walker, San Antonio, TX

Mr. James M. Duerr and Dr. Pamela Hall, San Antonio, TX

Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Evans, Coldspring, TX

Jack and Marsha Firestone, Miami, FL

Mr. and Mrs. Larry Gay, Mc Neil, AR

Mr. Charles Hanes, San Jose, CA

Brian Hencey and Charles Ross Jr., Austin, TX

Edward and Patricia Hymson, San Francisco, CA

Mrs. Judy Kay, Dallas, TX

Dr. and Mrs. Morton Leonard Jr., Galveston, TX

Cathleen C. and Jerome M. Loving, Bryan, TX

Barbara and Camp Matens, Baton Rogue, LA

Mr. Kenton McDonald, Corpus Christi, TX

Mr. and Mrs. Spencer Mehrens, Longview, TX

Mr. and Mrs. Bruce Misamore, Sedona, AZ

Mr. John P. Muth, Wimberly, TX

Dr. James F. Nelson and Mr. Yong Zhang, San Antonio, TX

Ms. Claire O'Malley, San Antonio, TX

Ms. Wanda A. Reynolds, Austin, TX

Michelle and Chuck Ritter, Kansas City, MO

Dr. Sid Roberts and Mrs. Catherine Roberts, Lufkin, TX

James and Nathanael Rosenheim, College Station, TX

Mr. and Mrs. Paul Welch, Shepherdstown, WV

Mr. Donald Wertz, Austin, TX

Ms. Charlotte Williams, Killeen, TX

Valerie and David Woodcock, College Station, TX

PATRONS CIRCLE—$5,000 OR MORE

Ms. Jacquelyn M. Abbott

Mr. W. Kendall Adam

Mrs. Norah G. Adams

Mrs. Nancy C. Allen

Mr. and Mrs. Orlando Alvarado

Alfredo Tijerina and JP Anderson

Shaza and Mark Anderson

Mr. and Mrs. Robert J. Ardell

Maida Asofsky

Mr. Neely Atkinson

Mr. Richard Avant

Nancy and Paul Balmert

Mr. William Bartlett

Mr. and Mrs. James Becker

Dr. James A. Belli and Dr. Patricia Eifel

Dr. and Mrs. Joel M. Berman

Drs. Henry and Louise Bethea

Mr. and Mrs. Stanley C. Beyer

Mr. and Mrs. Stephen D. Bickel

Dr. Joan Hacken Bitar

Dr. Jerry L. Bohannon

Mr. Jeffery Bosworth and Mr. Timothy Bammel

Mr. David Breece III

Mr. Al Brende and Mrs. Ann Bayless

Mr. Chester Brooke and Dr. Nancy Poindexter

Dr. Luis Camacho

Ms. Marion Cameron

Mr. Patrick Carfizzi

Mr. and Mrs. Thierry Caruso

Mrs. John R. Castano

Drs. Danuta and Ranjit Chacko

Dr. Beth Chambers and

Mr. J. Michael Chambers

Dr. Cindy Childress and Mr. Jack Charles

Mr. and Mrs. Jack Christiansen

Janet Clark

Ms. Donna Collins

Dr. and Mrs. J. Michael Condit

Dr. Nancy I. Cook

Mr. and Mrs. Sam Cooper

Mr. and Mrs. Larry Dooley

Dr. and Mrs. Giulio Draetta

Mrs. Eliza Duncan

Mr. John Egbert and Mrs. Kathy Beck

Kellie Elder and David Halbert

Mrs. James A. Elkins III

Parrish N. Erwin Jr.

Ms. Thea M. Fabio and Mr. Richard Merrill

Ms. Ann L. Faget

Mr. Brian Faulkner and Ms. Jackie Macha

Ms. Vicki Schmid Faulkner

Ms. Ursula Felmet

Mr. and Mrs. Dennis Fish

Wanda and Roger Fowler

Drs. Daniel and Jean Freeman

Mr. and Mrs. William B. Freeman Jr.

Dr. Alice Gates and Dr. Wayne Wilner

Dr. Layne O. Gentry

Nancy Glass, M.D. and John Belmont, M.D.

Rhoda Goldberg

Mr. Thomas K. Golden and Mrs. Susan Baker Golden

Mary Frances Gonzalez

Sue Goott

Mrs. Gwynn F. Gorsuch

Dr. and Mrs. David Y. Graham

Joyce Z. Greenberg

Dr. and Mrs. Stephen B. Greenberg

William and Jane Guest

Mr. and Mrs. Thomas C. Halsey

Mrs. Mary Hankey

Mr. Frank Harmon III and The Honorable Melinda Harmon

Mr. and Mrs. A. John Harper III

Pam Higgins and Tom Jones

Mrs. Ann G. Hightower

Doug Hirsch and Maureen Semple-Hirsch

Deborah and Michael Hirsch

Dr. Holly Holmes

Alan and Ellen Holzberg

Mr. and Mrs. John H. Homier

Dr. and Mrs. Gabriel N. Hortobagyi

Mr. and Mrs. Clay Hoster

Dr. Kevin Hude

Ms. Heather Hughes

Dr. Alan J. Hurwitz

Mr. and Mrs. Paul Jacob

Mr. and Mrs. Malick Jamal

Ms. Joan Jeffrey

Mr. and Mrs. James K. Jennings, Jr.

Mr. and Mrs. Basil Joffe

Charlotte Jones

Mr. and Mrs. Robert J. Kauffman

Mr. Anthony K.

Mr. and Mrs. George B. Kelly

Mr. and Mrs. Hugh Rice Kelly

Mr. and Mrs. Albert Kidd

Ms. Rie Kojima Angeli

Dr. and Mrs. Lary R. Kupor

Dr. Helen W. Lane

Mr. and Mrs. Bryant Lee

Mr. Richard Leibman

Ms. Eileen Louvier

Ms. Lynn Luster

Mr. and Mrs. Paul A. Lynn

Mark and Juliet Markovich

Dr. and Mrs. Malcolm Mazow

Shawna and Wynn McCloskey

Gillian and Michael McCord

Mimi Reed McGehee

Elizabeth and Keith McPherson

Wendy and Patrick McWilliams

Kay and Larry Medford

Mrs. Anne C. Mendelsohn

Terry and Hal Meyer

Dr. Douglas D. Miller

Mr. and Mrs. Sidney S. Moran

Mr. and Mrs. Stephen J. Morris

Ms. Shannon Morrison

Ms. Linda C. Murray

Mrs. Bobbie Newman

Ms. Geri Noel

Maureen O'Driscoll-Levy, M.D.

Drs. John and Karen Oldham

Geoffry H. Oshman

Mrs. Maria Papadopoulos

Adrienn L. Parsons

Mr. and Mrs. Harry C. Pinson

Mr. and Mrs. Elvin B. Pippert Jr.

Mrs. Jenny Popatia

Joan and Lou Pucher

Dr. and Mrs. Florante A. Quiocho

Ms. Judith Raines

Dr. David Reininger and Ms. Laura Lee Jones

Mr. Robert Richter Jr.

Mrs. Carol Ritter

Kate and Greg Robertson

Ms. Cristina M. Romeu

Mrs. Henry K. Roos

Drs. Alejandro and Lynn Rosas

Dr. and Mrs. Franklin Rose

Dr. and Mrs. Sean Rosenbaum

Mrs. Shirley Rose

Mr. and Mrs. Bob Ryan

Mr. Dave O. Schein and Ms. Karen M. Somer

Mrs. Richard P. Schissler Jr.

Mr. and Mrs. Charles Shearouse

Ms. Denmon Sigler and Mr. Peter Chok

Mr. Douglas Skopp

Kris and Chris Sonneborn

Mr. and Mrs. Aaron J. Stai

Dr. and Mrs. C. Richard Stasney

Mr. Per A. Staunstrup and Ms. Joan Bruun

Richard P. Steele and Mary McKerall

Mrs. Sue Stocks

Mr. Burke Strickland

Dr. Pavlina Suchanova

Drs. Adaani E. Frost and Wadi N. Suki

Mrs. Carolyn Taub

Ms. Susan L. Thompson

Mr. and Mrs. Charles Tobias

Mr. and Mrs. Robert B. Trainer Jr.

Dr. Elizabeth Travis and Mr. Jerry Hyde

Mr. and Mrs. Larry Veselka

Greg Vetter and Irene Kosturakis

Ms. Marie-Louise S. Viada

Ms. Vera D. Vujicic

Mr. and Mrs. M. C. "Bill" Walker III

Geoffrey Walker and Ann Kennedy

Diane and Raymond Wallace

Mr. and Mrs. John Wallace

Ms. Pippa Wiley

Randa Duncan Williams and Charles Williams

Dr. Courtney Williams

Ms. Jane L. Williams

Loretta and Lawrence Williams

Nancy and Sid Williams

Geraldina and Scott Wise

Ms. Debra Witges

Dr. Randall Wolf

Mr. and Mrs. John W. Wright

Drs. Edward Yeh and Hui-Ming Chang

Mr. and Mrs. Rick Zachardy

John L. Zipprich II

5 Anonymous

YOUNG PATRONS—$2,500 OR MORE

Dr. Matthew J. Bicocca and Mrs. Yvonne Pham Bicocca

Sarah and Steve Bond

Ms. Karin Chang

Mr. Michael Daus and Mr. Drew Synan

Mr. Sholto Davidson

Dr. Mhair Dekmezian

Mr. Alex Flores and Ms. Morgan Davis

Mr. Albert Garcia Jr.

Ms. Roya Gordon

Ms. Anna Gryska

Mr. Campbell Haynes-Dale

Mr. Birk Hutchens and Ms. Lauren Alleman

Mr. Daniel Katz

Lady Stephanie Kimbrell and Mr. Joshua Allison

Mr. Brett Lutz and Mrs. Elizabeth Lutz

Rachael and Daniel MacLeod

Mr. and Mrs. William McElhiney

Emily and Adrian Melendez

Ms. Zoe Miller

Mr. Juan Moreno

Tina and Adam Outland

Ms. Morgan A. Pfeil

Ms. Constance Rose-Edwards

Mr. and Mrs. Jeremy Rosen

Mr. Justin Rowinsky and Ms. Catarina Saraiva

Ms. Joan Sanborn and Mr. Dan Parisian

Abby Sanchez-Matzen and Lennart Matzen

Dr. Stephen Keith Sanders

Ms. Emily Schreiber

Emily Schultz and Pavel Blinchik

Mr. Lars Seemann and Mrs. Nancy Elmohamad

Mr. Jake D. Stefano

Kelsey Stewart

Ms. Susan Tan

Julia and Jason Wang

Joshua and Rebekah Wilkinson

Mr. and Mrs. Jamie Yarbrough

NATIONAL PATRONS—$2,500 OR MORE

Ms. Cynthia Akagi and Mr. Tom Akagi, Madison, WI

Mr. and Ms. Avinash Ahuja, Corpus Christi, TX

Mr. and Mrs. Thomas R. Allison, Olympia, WA

Dr. Debra Blatz, Austin, TX

Tom and Kay Brahaney, Midland, TX

Dr. Bernd U. Budelmann, Galveston, TX

Ms. Louise Cantwell, San Antonio, TX

Ms. Susan Carvel, New Braunfels, TX

Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Carvelli, Dhahran, Saudi Arabia

Dr. Raymond Chinn, San Diego, CA

Mr. and Mrs. Terry Cloudman, Boulder, Colorado

Ms. Kathleen Devine and Mr. Richard Reeves, New Braunfels, TX

Dr. and Mrs. Marvin A. Fishman, NM

Michael Freeburger and Matilda Perkins, Santa Fe, New Mexico

Mr. Raymond Goldstein and Ms. Jane T. Welch, San Antonio, TX

Ms. Gabriella M. Guerra, San Antonio, TX

Mr. Mark Jacobs, Dallas, TX

Ms. Gail Jarratt, San Antonio, TX

Mr. and Mrs. Geoffrey S. Kay, Austin, TX

Ms. Alison D. Kennamer and Joyce Kennamer, Brownsville, TX

Jeff and Gail Kodosky, Austin, TX

Mr. Peter Manis and Ms. Susan Richman, Chicago, IL

Dr. and Mrs. Stanley Milstein, Olney, MD

Mr. William Nicholas, Georgetown, TX

John and Elizabeth Nielsen-Gammon, College Station, TX

Mr. and Mrs. Eliseo Salazar, San Antonio, TX

Mr. Richard See, Lagunas Baru, Costa Rica

Mr. and Mrs. Victor E. Serrato, Pharr, TX

Robert and Nancy Shivers, San Antonio, TX

Ms. Alice Simkins, San Antonio, TX

Eleanor and Philip Straub, Metairie, LA

Mr. Kiyoshi Tamagawa and Mr. Bill Dick, Austin, TX

Dr. and Mrs. Clark D. Terrell, Boerne, TX

Dr. David N. Tobey and Dr. Michelle Berger, Austin, TX

Mr. and Mrs. Harvey Tucker, Bryan, TX

Mr. Tom Turnbull and Mr. Darrell Smith, Eunice, LA

Mrs. Rons Voogt, Huntsville, TX

Mr. and Mrs. Kirk Weaver, Washington, D.C.

Didi and Alan Weinblatt, San Antonio, TX

Jim and Sydney Wild, San Antonio, TX

HGO DONORS

Houston Grand Opera appreciates all individuals who contribute to the company’s success. Support in any amount is received most gratefully. Our donors share a dedication to supporting the arts in our community, and the generosity of these individuals makes it possible for HGO to sustain world-class opera in the Houston area. For information on becoming a Houston Grand Opera donor, please contact David Krohn, director of philanthropy, at 713-980-8685 or DKrohn@HGO.org.

ASSOCIATE PATRONS—

$2,000 OR MORE

Dr. Robert E. Anderson

Mr. and Mrs. V. G. Beghini

Ms. Sonja Bruzauskas and Mr. Houston Haymon

Mr. and Mrs. M. J. Castelberg

Kenneth T. Chin

Mr. Donald W. Clarke

Vicki Clepper

Mr. Jerry Conry

Ms. Joyce Cramer

Mr. and Mrs. Warren Dean

Cynthia A. Diller

Mr. Alan England

Mr. and Mrs. Blake Eskew

Ms. Julie Fischer

Dr. Wm. David George

Susan Giannatonio and Bruce Winquist

Mr. Michael Gillin and Ms. Pamela Newberry

Mr. and Mrs. Kirk Girouard

Mr. and Mrs. David Guenther

Mr. Claudio Gutierrez

Mr. and Mrs. Dewuse Guyton

Dr. and Mrs. Carlos R. Hamilton, Jr.

Mr. and Mrs. Michael F. Henderek

Mr. Stanley A. Hoffberger

Mr. and Mrs. Ronald E. Huebsch

Mr. Christopher Huff

Mr. and Mrs. Richard A. Jackson

Joan Kaplan

Mr. John Keville

Lynn Lamkin

Mr. Joel Luks

Ana María Martínez

Mr. James L. McNett

Ms. Maria C. (Macky) Osorio

Mr. and Ms. Carl Pascoe

Mr. Nigel Prior

Suzanne Page-Pryde and Arthur Pryde

Mr. Jack Rooker

Sharon Ruhly

Ramon and Chula Sanchez

Ms. Jo Ann W. Schaffer

Mr. and Mrs. Charles Schufreider

Christopher B. Schulze, M.D.

Dr. Wayne X. Shandera

Virginia Snider and Michael Osborne

Dr. Robert Southard

Mr. Leon Thomsen and Mrs. Pat Thomsen

Nancy Thompson

Mr. and Mrs. Alton L. Warren

Ms. Susan Trammell Whitfield

Pamela and James Wilhite

Ms. Elizabeth D. Williams

3 Anonymous

CONTRIBUTING FELLOWS—$1,000 OR MORE

Ms. Cecilia Aguilar

Mr. and Mrs. Neil Ken Alexander

Joan Alexander

Mrs. Linda Alexander

Mr. Robert K. Arnett Jr.

Ms. Dorothy B. Autin and Mr. Daniel Coleman

Dr. Carlos Bacino

Mrs. Deborah S. Bautch

Mr. Mervyn G. Blieden

Jim and Susan Boone

Mr. Bob F. Boydston

Ms. Julia Cambra

Ms. Mary Clark

Dr. Claude Cech

Mr. and Mrs. James Collins

Mr. and Mrs. Larry Corona

Mr. John Dazey

Peggy DeMarsh

Dr. Susan E. Denson

Dr. and Mrs. R. L. Deter

Mrs. Sarah D. Donaho

Mr. and Mrs. J. Thomas Eubank

Steve and Marie Fay Evnochides

Sylvia B. Fatzer

Travis Fenstermaker

Mr. and Mrs. Peter J. Ferenz

Mrs. Madeleine Ferris

Mr. David Fleischer

Mr. and Mrs. Michael Fowler

Lucy Gebhart

Mr. Enrico R. Giannetti

Mr. David Gockley

Ruzena Gordon

Ms. Janet Graves

Ms. Suzanne Green

Dr. James E. Griffin III and Dr. Margo Denke

Mr. and Mrs. Ira Gruber

Mr. and Mrs. W. F. Guinee

Mr. and Mrs. Philip Gunnels

Mr. Donald Hang

Ms. Rebecca Hansen

Mr. Rawley Penick and Mrs. Meredith L. Hathorn

Dr. Ralph J. Herring

Ms. Eliane S. Herring

Dr. Sallie T. Hightower

Kay and Michael W. Hilliard

Mr. Edward L. Hoffman

Mr. Steven Jay Hooker

Mr. John Hrncir

Mr. Francisco J. Izaguirre

Mr. Mark E. Jacobs

Mr. and Mrs. John Jordan

Dr. Ngaruiya Kariuki

Linda Katz

Lynda and Frank Kelly

Mr. and Mrs. John Lattin

Mr. John Lauber and Ms. Susan M. Coughlin

Mrs. Yildiz Lee

Mr. David Leebron and Ms. Ping Sun

Dr. Benjamin Lichtiger

Ms. Nadine Littles

Mrs. Sylvia Lohkamp

Mr. and Mrs. Karl R. Loos

Mr. Robert Lorio

Dr. Robert Louis

Mr. and Mrs. Oscar Y. Lui

Mr. and Mrs. C. Robert Mace

Ms. Nancy Manderson

Dr. and Mrs. Moshe H. Maor

Mr. and Mrs. Ben Marshall

Mr. H. Woods Martin

Onalee and Dr. Michael C. McEwen

Dr. Mary Fae McKay

Alexandra and Frank Meckel

Mrs. Theresa L. Meyer

Mr. Frank Modruson

Mr. and Mrs. Gerald Moynier

Mr. and Mrs. Marvin H. Mueller

Mr. and Mrs. Mike Newman

Mr. Dean Niemeyer and Dr. Marlowe D. Niemeyer

Ms. Jeanne M. Perdue

Mr. and Mrs. Dennis Phillips

Mr. and Mrs. Phil Plant

Dr. V.A. Pittman-Waller

Susie and Jim Pokorski

Mr. and Mrs. William Rawl

Mr. and Mrs. Richard Reynolds

Mr. and Mrs. Gene Steve Rhea

Mr. William K. Rice

Mansel and Brenda Rubenstein

Dr. Mo & Mrs. Brigitte Saidi

Alan J. Savada

Kathleen and Jed Sazama

Mr. Alan Schmitz

Kenneth and Deborah Scianna

Mr. Nick Shumway and Mr. Robert Mayott

Mr. Herbert Simons

Jan Simpson

Mr. John S. Skaggs

Ms. Diana Skerl

Mr. and Mrs. Louis. S. Sklar

Ms. Anne Sloan

Len Slusser

Ms. Linda F. Sonier

Mr. and Mrs. George Stark

Mr. Leon Strieder

Mr. and Mrs. Tim Unger

Darlene Walker

Andrea Ward and David Trahan

Mr. Peter J. Wender

J. M. Weltzien

Mrs. Dolores Wilkenfeld

Drs. William and Huda Yahya Zoghbi

3 Anonymous

CORPORATE, FOUNDATION, AND GOVERNMENT SUPPORTERS

Houston Grand Opera’s corporate, foundation, and government partners make it possible for HGO to create and share great art with our community. We are incredibly proud to work with these organizations and grateful for all they do. For information on joining HGO’s valued team of corporate and foundation supporters, please contact Kelly Finn, director of institutional giving, at 713-546-0265 or KFinn@HGO.org.

CORPORATE, FOUNDATION, GOVERNMENT

HOUSTON GRAND OPERA CORPORATE COUNCIL

Thomas R. Ajamie, Ajamie LLP

Chris Angelides, Shell USA, Inc.

J. Scott Arnoldy, Triten Corporation

Chris Bacon, Vinson & Elkins LLP

C. Mark Baker, Norton Rose Fulbright LLP

Astley Blair, Marine Well Containment Company

Meg Boulware, Boulware & Valoir

Albert Chao, Westlake Corporation

Adam Cook, Tokio Marine HCC

Joshua Davidson, Baker Botts L.L.P.

Susan R. Eisenberg, Kirkland & Ellis LLP

Warren Ellsworth, MD, Houston Methodist

Richard Husseini, Kirkland & Ellis LLP

Michelle Huth, Frost Bank

Beth Jarlock, EY

Bill Kroger, Baker Botts L.L.P.

David LePori, Frost Bank

Bryce Lindner, Bank of America

Claire Liu, LyondellBasell (Retired)

Craig Miller, Frost Bank

Ward Pennebaker, Pennebaker

Gloria M. Portela, Seyfarth Shaw LLP

Allyn Risley, GTT North America

Susan Rivera, Tokio Marine HCC

Kelly Rose, ConocoPhillips

Glen Rosenbaum, Vinson & Elkins LLP

Silvia Salle, Bank of America

Susan Saurage-Altenloh, Saurage Marketing Research

Apurva Thekdi, MD, Houston Methodist

Ignacio Torras, Tricon Energy

Alfredo Vilas, Novum Energy

CORPORATE SUPPORTERS

GUARANTORS—$100,000 OR MORE

ConocoPhillips †

Frost Bank †

H-E-B †

Houston Methodist †*

Novum Energy

Vinson & Elkins LLP †*

GRAND UNDERWRITERS— $50,000 OR MORE

Ajamie LLP

Bank of America †

M. David Lowe and Nana Booker Booker · Lowe Gallery

Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo™ †

Kirkland & Ellis LLP

Shell USA, Inc. †

UNDERWRITERS—$25,000 OR MORE

Baker Botts L.L.P. †

Boulware & Valoir

Norton Rose Fulbright LLP †

POST Houston Principal

Saurage Marketing Research

Tokio Marine HCC

Wells Fargo

Westlake Corporation †

SPONSORS—$10,000 OR MORE

CenterPoint Energy

MEMBERS—$1,000 OR MORE

Infosys

Maovor, Inc.

Patterson & Sheridan LLP

Union Pacific

IN-KIND CONTRIBUTORS TO OPERATIONS AND SPECIAL EVENTS

UNDERWRITERS—$25,000 OR MORE

Abrahams Oriental Rugs and Home Furnishings

ALTO

City Kitchen Catering

The Events Company

Jackson & Company Catering

SPONSORS—$15,000 OR MORE

Kirksey Gregg Productions

Magnolia Houston

CO-SPONSORS—$7,500 OR MORE

BCN Taste and Tradition

Elegant Events and Catering by Michael

Fort Bend Music Company

Medallion Global Wine Group

BENEFACTORS—$5,000 OR MORE

The Corinthian at Franklin Lofts

David Peck

The Lancaster Hotel

Masterson Design/Mariquita Masterson

Shaftel Diamond Co.

MEMBERS—$1,000 OR MORE

Brasserie du Parc

Connie Kwan-Wong/CWK Collection Inc.

Dar Schafer Art

Elliott Marketing Group

Michaela Greenan, Corporate Council Chair

Ellsworth Plastic Surgery

Gittings Portraiture

Glade Cultural Center

Hayden Lasher

The Hotel ZaZa

La Colombe d'Or Hotel

Las Terrazas Resort & Residences

Lavandula Design

Mayfield Piano Service

Shoocha Photography

FOUNDATIONS AND GOVERNMENT AGENCIES

PREMIER GUARANTOR—

$1,000,000 OR MORE

The Brown Foundation, Inc. †

Houston Grand Opera Endowment Inc. †

The Wortham Foundation, Inc. †

Anonymous

PRINCIPAL GUARANTORS—

$500,000 OR MORE

City of Houston through Houston Arts Alliance †

Anonymous

GRAND GUARANTORS—

$250,000 OR MORE

The Alkek and Williams Foundation †

Carol Franc Buck Foundation

Edgar Foster Daniels Foundation

Humphreys Foundation †

Andrew W. Mellon Foundation †

National Endowment for the Humanities

Texas Commission on the Arts †

Anonymous

GUARANTORS—$100,000 OR MORE

M.D. Anderson Foundation †

The Robert & Jane Cizik Foundation

The Cullen Foundation †

The Cullen Trust for the Performing Arts †

The Robert and Janice McNair Foundation †

National Endowment for the Arts †

The Sarofim Foundation

William Randolph Hearst Foundation

GRAND UNDERWRITERS—

$50,000 OR MORE

City of Houston through the Miller Theatre Advisory Board †

John P. McGovern Foundation †

The Powell Foundation †

UNDERWRITERS—$25,000 OR MORE

Joan and Stanford Alexander Family Fund

Ruth and Ted Bauer Family Foundation †

OPERA America

Stedman West Foundation †

Vivian L. Smith Foundation

SPONSORS—$10,000 OR MORE

Cockrell Family Fund

Sterling-Turner Foundation

William E. and Natoma Pyle Harvey Charitable Trust †

MEMBERS—$1,000 OR MORE

University of Houston

Bauer College of Business

George and Mary Josephine Hamman Foundation †

Houston Grand Opera Guild †

Houston Endowment Inc.

Houston Saengerbund

The Nathan J. Klein Fund

* Contribution includes in- kind support † Ten or more years of consecutive support

CORPORATE MATCHING

Baker Hughes Foundation

Bank of America Charitable Foundation

BP Foundation

Chevron Humankind

CITGO Petroleum

Coca-Cola North America

ConocoPhillips

Encana

EOG Resources, Inc.

EQT Foundation

ExxonMobil Foundation

Fannie Mae

Hewlett-Packard Company

IBM Corporation

Illinois Tools Works Inc.

LyondellBasell Chemical Company

Macquarie

Microsoft Employee Giving

Nintendo Of America

Quantlab Financial, LLC

Salesforce

Shell USA, Inc. Foundation

The Boeing Company

Union Pacific Williams Companies

LAUREATE SOCIETY

Helen Wils, Chair

The Laureate Society comprises individuals who have helped ensure the future of Houston Grand Opera by remembering the Opera in their wills, retirement plans, trusts, or other types of estate plans. The Laureate Society does not require a minimum amount to become a member. Planned estate gifts to the Houston Grand Opera Endowment can be used to support general or specific Opera programs. Houston Grand Opera is deeply grateful to these individuals. Their generosity and foresight enable the Opera to maintain its growth and stability, thus enriching the lives of future generations. For information regarding charitable estate gift planning and how it might positively impact you, your loved ones, and Houston Grand Opera, please contact Amanda Neiter, director of legacy giving, at 713-546-0216 or ANeiter@HGO.org.

LAUREATE SOCIETY MEMBERS

Ms. Gerry Aitken

Margaret Alkek Williams

Mr. William J. Altenloh and Dr. Susan Saurage-Altenloh

Robin Angly and Miles Smith

Bill A. Arning and Aaron Skolnick

Mrs. Judie Aronson

Christopher Bacon and Craig Miller

Gilbert Baker

Dr. Saúl and Ursula Balagura

Mr. William Bartlett

Mr. James Barton

Mr. Lary Dewain Barton

Michelle Beale and Dick Anderson

Marcheta Leighton-Beasley

Jack Bell

Mrs. Natalie Beller

Dr. James A. Belli and Dr. Patricia Eifel

Mr. and Mrs. Stanley C. Beyer

Dr. Joan Hacken Bitar

Susan Ross Black

Dr. Michael and Susan Bloome

Dr. and Mrs. Jules H. Bohnn

Ms. Lynda Bowman

Mr. and Mrs. Harry W. Bristol

Ms. Zu Dell Broadwater

Catherine Brock

Myra Brown

Mr. Richard S. Brown

Mr. Logan D. Browning

Mr. Richard H. Buffett

Mr. Tom Burley and Mr. Michael Arellano

Mr. Ralph Byle

Ms. Gwyneth Campbell

Roxi Cargill and Peter Weston, M.D.

Jess and Patricia Carnes

Ms. Janet Langford Carrig

Sylvia J. Carroll

Ms. Nada Chandler

Mr. Robert N. Chanon

Ms. Virginia Ann Clark

Mathilda Cochran

Mr. William E. Colburn

Mr. and Mrs. Paul L. Comstock

Mr. Jim O. Connell

Mrs. Christa M. Cooper

Mr. Efraín Z. Corzo and Mr. Andrew Bowen

Mr. and Mrs. James W. Crownover

Shelly Cyprus

Mr. Karl Dahm

Dr. Lida Dahm

Mr. Darrin Davis

Ms. Sasha Davis

Ms. Anna M. Dean

Peggy DeMarsh

Ian Derrer and Daniel James

Dr. Russell Deter

Ms. Elisabeth DeWitts

Connie Dyer

Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Evans

Ms. Thea M. Fabio and Mr. Richard Merrill

Ms. Ann L. Faget

Ms. Vicki Schmid Faulkner

Mrs. Thomas Fauntleroy

Jack and Marsha Firestone

Carol Lay Fletcher

Mr. Bruce Ford

Dr. Donna Fox

Dr. Alice Gates and Dr. Wayne Wilner

Dr. Layne O. Gentry

Mr. Michael B. George

Dr. Wm. David George

Dr. and Mrs. David P. Gill

Lynn Gissel

Mr. Wesley Goble

Mr. David Gockley

Rhoda Goldberg

Leonard A. Goldstein and Helen B. Wils

Mary Frances Gonzalez

Jon Kevin Gossett

Mr. and Mrs. Fred Gott

Mr. and Mrs. Donald Graubart

Claire Liu and Joe Greenberg

Dr. Nichols Grimes

Dr. Ellen R. Gritz and Mr. Milton D. Rosenau Jr.

Mr. Jas A. Gundry

Mr. Claudio Gutierrez

Dr. Robert W. Guynn

Mr. and Mrs. William Haase

Dr. Linda L. Hart

Mrs. Brenda Harvey-Traylor

Nancy Haywood

Teresita and Michael Hernandez

Dr. Ralph J. Herring

Mr. and Mrs. Robert C. Hewell

Mr. Edward L. Hoffman

Gary Hollingsworth and Ken Hyde

Alan and Ellen Holzberg

Mr. Frank Hood

Ms. Ami J. Hooper

Mr. and Mrs. George M. Hricik

Lee M. Huber

Robert and Kitty Hunter

Greg Ingram

Brian James

Spencer A. Jeffries and Kim Hawkins

Ms. Charlotte Jones

Cynthia J. Johnson

Ms. Marianne Kah

Mr. and Mrs. Robert J. Kauffman

Ann and Stephen Kaufman

Charles Dennis and Steve Kelley

Mr. Anthony K.

Ms. Virginia E. Kiser

Ann Koster

Dr. Lynn Lamkin

Ms. Michele LaNoue and Mr. Gerald Seidl

Carolyn J. Levy

Mr. and Mrs. W. H. Liesner

Mr. Michael Linkins

Mr. and Mrs. Karl R. Loos

Mrs. Marilyn Lummis

Dr. Jo Wilkinson Lyday

Mr. and Mrs. Paul A. Lynn

Sandy L. Magers

Mrs. Rosemary Malbin

Ms. Michele Malloy

Emily Bivona and Ryan Manser

Mrs. J. Landis Martin

Ms. B. Lynn Mathre

Ms. Nancy Wynne Mattison

Dr. and Mrs. Malcolm Mazow

Mrs. Dorothy McCaine

Mrs. Sarah McCollum

Deirdre McDowell

Muffy and Mike McLanahan

Will L. McLendon

Mr. Allen McReynolds

Ms. Maryellen McSweeney

Mr. and Mrs. D. Bradley McWilliams

Christianne Melanson and Durwin Sharp

Mr. and Mrs. Robert Menzie

Ms. Georgette M. Michko

Ms. Suzanne Mimnaugh

Kathleen Moore and Steven Homer

Sid Moorhead

Juan R. Morales

Mr. and Mrs. Sidney S. Moran

Mr. and Mrs. Marvin H. Mueller

Ms. Linda C. Murray

Terrylin G. Neale

Erik B. Nelson and Terry R. Brandhorst

Mrs. Bobbie Newman

Mrs. Tassie Nicandros

Beverly and Staman Ogilvie

Geoffry H. Oshman

Ms. Maria C. (Macky) Osorio

Susan and Edward Osterberg

Mrs. Joan D. Osterweil

Mr. and Mrs. Richard A. Percoco

Sara M. Peterson

Mark and Nancy Picus

Mr. and Mrs. Harry C. Pinson

Susie and Jim Pokorski

Gloria M. Portela

Suzanne Page-Pryde and Arthur Pryde

Dr. Angela Rechichi-Apollo

Mr. Todd Reppert

Conrad and Charlaine Reynolds

Ms. Wanda A. Reynolds

Ed and Janet Rinehart

Edward N. Robinson

Mrs. Shirley Rose

Glen A. Rosenbaum

Mr. John C. Rudder Jr.

H. Clifford Rudisill and Ray E. Wilson

Mr. and Mrs. Tom Rushing

Dr. Mo & Mrs. Brigitte Saidi

Mr. and Mrs. Terrell F. Sanders

Ms. Wanda Schaffner

Mr. Chris Schilling

Kenneth and Deborah Scianna

Mr. and Mrs. Charles Senuta

Mrs. Helen P. Shaffer

Ms. Sue A. Shirley-Howard

Hinda Simon

Mr. Herbert Simons

Ms. Susan Simpson

Ms. Janet Sims

Bruce Smith

Mr. Robert J. Smouse

Ms. Linda F. Sonier

Dian and Harlan Stai

Ms. Darla Y. Stange

Dr. and Mrs. C. Richard Stasney

Catherine Stevenson

Rhonda Sweeney

Susan Tan

Mrs. Carolyn Taub

Mr. Quentin Thigpen and Ms. Amy Psaris

Fiona Toth

Mr. John G. Turner and Mr. Jerry G. Fischer

Mr. and Mrs. Paul Turner

Mr. and Mrs. Jesse B. Tutor

Birgitt van Wijk

Mr. and Mrs. Alfredo Vilas

Marietta Voglis

Mrs. Rons Voogt

James and Mary Waggoner

Dean Walker

Mr. William V. Walker

Shirley Warshaw

Mr. Gordon D. Watson

Ms. Rebecca Weaver

Mr. Jesse Weir

Mr. Geoffrey Westergaard

Pippa Wiley

Ms. Jane L. Williams

Mr. and Mrs. David S. Wolff

Dr. Fabian Worthing

Jo Dee Wright

Lynn Wyatt

Alan and Frank York

Mr. and Mrs. Mark Yzaguirre

Mrs. Lorena Zavala

John L. Zipprich II

17 Anonymous

WE HONOR THE MEMORY OF THOSE WHO INCLUDED HGO IN THEIR ESTATE PLANS:

Elaine Jaffe Altschuler

Dr. Antonio Arana

Janice Barrow

Dr. Thomas D. Barrow

Ronald Borschow

Mr. Stephen R. Brenner

Mr. Ira B. Brown

Joan Bruchas and H. Philip Cowdin

Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Capshaw

Dr. Lawrence E. Carlton

Mr. Tony Carroll, LCSW

Michael Cochran

Judy Cummings

Karl A. Dahm

Ms. Marilyn R. Davis

Dick Evans

Frank R. Eyler

Linda Finger

Christine E. George

Harold Gilliland

Adelma Graham

Roberta and Jack Harris

Jackson C. Hicks

Dr. Marjorie Horning

Mark Lensky

Mary R. Lewis

Bette and Peter Liebgold

Mrs. Margaret Love

Ms. Marsha Malev

Frances Marzio

Mr. Constantine Nicandros

M. Joan Nish

Mr. James W. O’Keefe

Barbara M. Osborne

Mrs. Mary Ann Phillips

HOUSTON GRAND OPERA ENDOWMENT

Mr. Howard Pieper

Mr. and Mrs. Craig M. Rowley

Mrs. Joseph P. Ruddell

Sue Simpson Schwartz

Mr. Eric W. Stein Sr.

John and Fanny Stone

Dr. Carlos Vallbona

Daisy Wong

Miss Bonnie Sue Wooldridge

The Houston Grand Opera Endowment, Inc., is a separate nonprofit organization that invests contributions to earn income for the benefit of Houston Grand Opera Association. The Endowment Board works with CAPTRUST, an independent investment counsel, to engage professional investment managers. An endowed fund can be permanently established within the Houston Grand Opera Endowment through a direct contribution or via a planned gift such as a bequest. The fund can be designated for general purposes or specific interests. For a discussion on endowing a fund, please contact Deborah Hirsch, senior director of philanthropy, at 713-546-0259 or DHirsch@HGO.org. HGO acknowledges with deep gratitude the following endowed funds.

Marianne Kah, Chair

BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Officers

Marianne Kah, Chair

Mark Poag, Vice Chair

Terrylin Neale, Secretary; Treasurer

Yolanda Knull, Senior Chair

Tom Rushing, Chair Emeritus

Members at Large

Thomas R. Ajamie

Janet Langford Carrig

Khori Dastoor

Carolyn Galfione

Richard Husseini

Stephen Kaufman

Claire Liu

Scott Wise

GENERAL ENDOWMENT FUNDS

Susan Saurage-Altenloh and William Altenloh Endowed Fund

The Rudy Avelar Patron Services Fund

Barrow Family Endowed Fund

Charles T. (Ted) Bauer Memorial Fund

Sandra Bernhard Endowed Fund

The Stanley and Shirley Beyer Endowed Fund

Ronald C. Borschow Endowment Fund

Mary Frances Newton Bowers Endowment Fund

Pat and Daniel A. Breen Endowment Fund

The Brown Foundation Endowment Fund

Joan Bruchas and H. Philip Cowdin Endowed Fund

Sarah and Ernest Butler Endowment Fund

Jane and Robert Cizik Endowment

Michael and Mathilda Cochran Endowment Fund

Douglas E. Colin Endowment Fund

The Gerald and Bobbie-Vee Cooney Rudy Avelar Fund

Mary Jane Fedder Endowed Fund

Linda K. Finger Endowed Fund

Robert W. George Endowment Fund

Harold Gilliland Endowed Fund

Adelma Graham Endowed Fund

Frank Greenberg, M.D. Endowment Fund

Roberta and Jack Harris Endowed Fund

Jackson D. Hicks Endowment Fund

General and Mrs. Maurice Hirsch Memorial Opera Fund

Ann Holmes Endowed Fund

Ira Brown Endowment Fund

Elizabeth Rieke and Wayne V. Jones Endowment Fund

Leech Family Resilience Fund

Lensky Family Endowed Fund

Mary R. Lewis Endowed Fund

Beth Madison Endowed Fund

Frances Marzio Fund for Excellence

Franci Neely Endowed Fund

Constantine S. Nicandros Endowment Fund

Barbara M. Osborne Charitable Trust

Cynthia and Anthony Petrello Endowed Fund

Mary Ann Phillips Endowed Fund

C. Howard Pieper Endowment Fund

Kitty King Powell Endowment Fund

Rowley Family Endowment Fund

The Ruddell Endowment Fund

Sue Simpson Schwartz Endowment Fund

Shell Lubricants (formerly Pennzoil — Quaker State Company) Fund

Dian and Harlan Stai Fund

The John and Fanny Stone Endowment Fund

Dorothy Barton Thomas Endowment Fund

John G. Turner and Jerry G. Fischer Endowed Fund

John and Sheila Tweed Endowed Fund

Marietta Voglis Endowed Fund

Bonnie Sue Wooldridge Endowment Fund

The Wortham Foundation Permanent Endowment Fund

PRODUCTION FUNDS

Edward and Frances Bing Fund

Tracey D. Conwell Endowment Fund

The Wagner Fund

PRINCIPAL ARTISTS FUNDS

Jesse Weir and Roberto Ayala Artist Fund

The Lynn Wyatt Great Artist Fund

ENDOWED CHAIRS AND FELLOWSHIPS

Margaret Alkek Williams Chair: Khori Dastoor, General Director and Chief Executive Officer

Sarah and Ernest Butler Chair: Patrick Summers, Artistic and Music Director

Sarah and Ernest Butler

Chorus Director Chair: Richard Bado

Sarah and Ernest Butler

Concertmaster Chair: Denise Tarrant

Mr. and Mrs. James A. Elkins Jr.

Endowed Chair: Peter Pasztor

Mr. and Mrs. Albert B. Alkek Chair: Maureen Zoltek

James A. Elkins Jr. Endowed Visiting Artist Fund

SARAH AND ERNEST BUTLER HOUSTON GRAND OPERA STUDIO FUNDS

Audrey Jones Beck Endowed Fellowship Fund/Houston Endowment, Inc.

The Gordon and Mary Cain Foundation Endowment Fund

Marjorie and Thomas Capshaw Endowment Fund

Houston Grand Opera Guild Endowment Fund

James J. Drach Endowment Fund

Evans and Portela Family Endowed Chair

Carol Lynn Lay Fletcher Endowment Fund

William Randolph Hearst Endowed Scholarship Fund

Charlotte Howe Memorial Scholarship Fund

Elva Lobit Opera Endowment Fund

Marian and Speros Martel Foundation Endowment Fund

Laura and Brad McWilliams Endowed Fund

Erin Gregory Neale Endowment Fund

Dr. Mary Joan Nish and Patricia Bratsas Endowed Fund

John M. O’Quinn Foundation Endowed Fellowship Fund

Shell Lubricants (formerly Pennzoil — Quaker State Company) Fund

Mary C. Gayler Snook Endowment Fund

Dian and Harlan Stai Fund

Tenneco, Inc. Endowment Fund

Weston-Cargill Endowed Fund

EDUCATION FUNDS

Bauer Family Fund

Sandra Bernhard Education Fund

Lawrence E. Carlton, M.D., Endowment Fund

Beth Crispin Endowment Fund

James J. Drach Endowment Fund

Fondren Foundation Fund for Educational Programs

David Clark Grant Endowment Fund

The Schissler Family Foundation Endowed Fund for Educational Programs

OUTREACH FUNDS

Guyla Pircher Harris Project

Spring Opera Festival Fund (Shell Lubricants, formerly Pennzoil—Quaker State Company)

CONCERT OF ARIAS

Eleanor Searle McCollum Endowment Fund

ELECTRONIC MEDIA FUNDS

The Ford Foundation Endowment Fund

SAVE THE DATES

OCTOBER 21, NOVEMBER 4, 18

Houston Public Library Autumn Song Series: Join HGO and HPL for a series of meditative and relaxing vocal recitals celebrating the vast diversity of our cultures and languages while promoting wellness. 11:30 a.m. Central Library Jesse H. Jones Building. More info at houstonlibrary.org.

OCTOBER 27, 29M, NOVEMBER

4, 8, 10

Performances of Verdi’s Falstaff Wortham Theater Center’s Brown Theater. Ticketholders are invited to Opera Insights lectures, held in the Brown’s Orchestra section 45 minutes prior to each performance. Special intermis-

OCTOBER 20

Opening Night Dinner: HGO celebrates the launch of the 2023-24 season following the opening performance of worldpremiere opera Intelligence Wortham Theater Center. Myrtle Jones and Sara Morgan, Chairs. For more info, visit HGO.org/OpeningNight, or contact Brooke Rogers at BRogers@HGO.org or 713-546-0271.

OCTOBER 20, 22M, 28,

NOVEMBER 1, 3

Performances of Jake Heggie, Gene Scheer, and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar’s Intelligence Wortham Theater Center’s Brown Theater. Ticketholders are invited to Opera Insights lectures, held in the Brown’s Orchestra section 45 minutes prior to each performance. Special intermission reception for members of Opening Nights for Young Professionals at the October 20 performance only.

OCTOBER 18

Opera Club Meeting for high school students, followed by 7:30 p.m. dress rehearsal for Intelligence. For information, email Community@HGO.org.

sion reception for members of Opening Nights for Young Professionals at the October 27 performance only, and for members of Overture at the November 4 performance only.

OCTOBER 30

High School Night: HGO hosts an invite-only, full-length performance of Intelligence for high school students and their chaperones. Invitation-only.

THROUGH DECEMBER 13

Katie: The Strongest of the Strong: This year’s Opera to Go! touring production for students presents Faye Chiao and Anton Dudley’s HGO-commissioned original opera. The 45-minute opera celebrates women’s strength and confidence through the inspiring true story of protagonist Katie Sandwina, a circus strongwoman who defied expectations and went on to help lead the U.S. suffrage movement in the

early 1900s. Recommended for children grades 2-8. To book this exciting show at your school, community center, or other venue, email OperaToGo@HGO.org or visit HGO.org/operatogo.

DECEMBER 3

HGO presents singers from the Bauer Family High School Voice Studio in a masterclass with a company artist. 2 p.m. Free; public invited. Contact Lisa Vickers at LVickers@HGO.org for information.

DECEMBER 8 AND 10

Butler Studio Recital Series: Artists of the Butler Studio perform in the intimate and elegant salon at Rienzi, the decorative arts wing of the museum of Fine Arts, Houston. 7:30 p.m. December 8; 5 p.m. December 10.

DECEMBER 9

Carols on the Green, an evening of music celebrating the rich cultures of our community, as well as the Hanukkah, Christmas, and holiday season, at Discovery Green. 7 p.m.

2023 Laffont Competition Houston District winners Dorothy Gal, Hayden Smith and Audrey Welsh

MAKE THE MOST OF YOUR VISIT

AS PART OF HGO’S

OPERATIC

A HOST OF UPGRADES FOR

KNOW BEFORE YOU GO: VISIT THE NEW HGO.ORG

This season we are debuting a gorgeous new website! The reimagined site is your user-friendly one-stop shop for everything HGO. Resources include:

Your all-access guide to performances, on the mainstage and in the community: HGO.org/on-stage

The Backstage Pass blog, for taking a deep dive into the season’s operas: HGO. org/backstage-pass

Plan Your Visit information, from parking options, to hotel recommendations, to FAQs, and much more: HGO.org/ plan-your-visit

HGO’s Customer Care Center, including performance information, ticket assistance, and more: HGO.org/ contact-us

And much more!

Take advantage of all the new tools we’ve created for you, now available at HGO.org

ENJOY THE WORTHAM

We encourage our guests to make full use of the Wortham Theater Center when they come to the opera. You’re invited to:

The Founders Salon: The Founders Salon features a prix-fixe, seasonally inspired menu. Reservations are required, with a priority reservation window open for Patrons Circle members up to 72 hours before the performance date. Reservations then open to full-season subscribers. To reserve, call 713-533-9318 or email Cafe@ ElegantEventsByMichael.com.

Relax and reflect: Find a spot in one of the Wortham Theater Center’s Brown or Cullen alcoves, or another area in the concourse—now with expanded seating!

New this fall: Don’t miss The Intelligence Experience, a trip behind the scenes of HGO’s history-making new opera, including set and costume designs, historic quilts, and more on the making of this exciting world premiere. The exhibit is now on view in the Grand Foyer East Wing.

New for 2023-24: The piano music in the foyer last spring was so popular, this year we’re bringing it back all season long!

Rent a pair of binoculars: Want to see the action up close? You can rent binoculars on the Grand Tier level (5th floor).

Browse the merchandise: Volunteers from the HGO Guild operate a gift and souvenir boutique in the Grand Foyer.

Dine in: Food services are available prior to each performance in the Grand Foyer.

New this season! Parfait kits, antipasti kebabs, caprese skewers, and much more are now available at the Grab N Go station.

Enjoy a drink: The lobby bars are open before each performance and during intermission. Pro-tip: Pre-order beverages for intermission at any of the bars when you arrive at the theater, and your drinks will be waiting for you!

New this season! More bars, bartenders, and seating, plus an expanded selection, themed cocktails inspired by the season’s productions, and the Happy Half Hour— guests receive $2 off all beer, wine, and cocktails at all bars for the first 30 minutes the theater is open (each bar begins service 90 minutes before performance time).

Attend a free Opera Insights lecture: Brush up on the day’s opera during one of HGO's popular pre-show talks. Join us on the Orchestra level of the Brown Auditorium 45 minutes before curtain time.

COMMITMENT TO YOU AND YOUR

EXPERIENCE, THE COMPANY IS INTRODUCING

THE 2023-24 SEASON.

There’s lots of fun to be had downtown! Spots to explore include:

EXPLORE DOWNTOWN

HGO's recommendations for making the most of our vibrant neighborhood

Market Square Park: Houston’s oldest park.

The Buffalo Bayou Walking Trail: Walk or take a tour of the bayou on a Segway and cover more ground.

Downtown Houston Tunnel System: a system of underground tunnels that includes myriad restaurants and food halls.

Bayou Place: a collection of entertainment and dining venues.

Minute Maid Park: home of the Houston Astros.

Discovery Green: a vibrant urban park.

Julia Ideson Library: historic library with distinctive and elegant Spanish architecture. Avenida Houston: fun place to sip, stroll, and savor.

Toyota Center: home of the Houston Rockets.

Sam Houston Park: eight historic homes in a park setting, open for tours.

Guard and Grace, for steaks, oysters, and charcuterie with a view.

B&B Butchers & Restaurant, for the finest Texas and Japanese Wagyu hand-cut steaks.

Bravery Food Hall, for a casual, chef-driven culinary experience.

Cultivated F+B in the Lancaster Hotel, for a refined night out at a historic Houston landmark.

Rosalie Italian Soul in the C. Baldwin, for red-sauce Italian in a gorgeous setting.

Common Bond Brasserie, for French comfort classics in an adorable dining room.

POST Houston Food Hall, for a foodie paradise inside an eye-popping downtown landmark (as featured on Top Chef !).

Lyric Market food hall, for a wide variety of tasty cuisines and a gorgeous bar in a fun, urban setting.

VISIT THE NEW LYNN WYATT SQUARE!

Lynn Wyatt Square for the Performing Arts, downtown’s new $26.5 million green space, made its debut in September. Located right across from Jones Hall and replacing what was known as Jones Plaza, this beautiful new attraction is available for all Houstonians to enjoy thanks to Houston First, the Downtown Redevelopment Authority, and the wonderful Lynn Wyatt, a longtime HGO supporter and board member. The Square features a performance lawn and gardens where Houstonians can relax while enjoying concerts and other free programs throughout the year. For more info, visit lynnwyattsquare.com

HOUSTON GRAND OPERA MANAGEMENT & STAFF

Khori Dastoor

General Director and CEO

Margaret Alkek Williams Chair

Patrick Summers

Artistic and Music Director *

Sarah and Ernest Butler Chair

EXECUTIVE LEADERSHIP GROUP

Richard Bado, Director of Artistic Planning/Chorus Director *, Sarah and Ernest Butler Chorus Director Chair

Jennifer Bowman, Director of Community and Learning

Jennifer Davenport, Chief Marketing and Experience Officer

Molly Dill, Chief Operating Officer *

Elizabeth Greer, Chief Financial Officer

Gregory S. Robertson, Chief Philanthropy Officer *

OFFICE OF THE GENERAL DIRECTOR

Shelby Connolly, Governance Manager

Sadie Dill, Special Assistant to the Office of the General Director

Mary Elsey, Chief of Staff to the General Director and CEO

Eun Sun Kim, Principal Guest Conductor

Ana María Martínez, Artistic Advisor

Claire Padien-Havens, Director of Strategic Projects & Initiatives

Joel Thompson, Composer-in-Residence

ARTISTIC

Chris Abide, Rehearsal Manager

Richard S. Brown, Orchestra Personnel Manager *

Bart Dunn, Music Librarian

Joel Goodloe, Associate Director of Rehearsal Planning & Artist Services

Amy Hoang, Music Administrator

Kiera Krieg, Rehearsal Planning & Artist Services Administrator

Kirill Kuzmin, Principal Coach

Joanna Latini, Butler Studio Administrator

Mark C. Lear, Associate Artistic Administrator *

Peter Pasztor, Principal Coach *

Teddy Poll, Resident Conductor

Karen Reeves, Children’s Chorus Director *

Jack Ruffer, Artist Services Coordinator

Madeline Slettedahl, Assistant Conductor

Monica Thakkar, Associate Director of Artistic Planning

William Woodard, Assistant Conductor

Maureen Zoltek, Head of Music Staff and Butler Studio Music Director

Mr. & Mrs. Albert B. Alkek Chair

AUDIENCES

Marc Alba, Customer Care Specialist

Ellen Bergener, Customer Care Representative

Gabrielle Castillo, Customer Care Specialist

Chelsea Crouse, Creative Manager

Juan Flores, Customer Care Specialist

Amber Francis, Communications Coordinator

Clarisa Galindo, Marketing Coordinator

Jessica Gonzalez, Marketing Manager

Sofia Heggem, Guest Experience Coordinator

Scott Ipsen, Director of Patron Experience *

Rita Jia, Graphic Designer

Latrinita Johnson, Customer Care Specialist

Jazzlyn Levigne, Customer Care Representative

Tory Lieberman, Director of Marketing

Stephan Little, Customer Care Specialist

Catherine Matusow, Director of Communications

Matt McKee, Associate Director of Sales and Service

Brian Mitchell, Archivist, The Genevieve P. Demme Archives and Resource Center *

Joel Nott, Customer Care Specialist

Michelle Russell, Ticketing & Marketing Data Manager

Alan Sellar, Videographer

Amber Sheppard, Patron Services Manager

Armando Urdiales, Group Sales Coordinator

Dorian Valenzuela, Digital Content Manager

Dana Walker, Guest Experience Manager

COMMUNITY AND LEARNING

Favour Aimufua, Programs Coordinator

George Heathco, Programs Coordinator

Patty Holley, Program Manager of School & Educator Engagement

Alisa Magallón, Associate Director of Programming & Engagement *

Karen Mata, Operations Manager

Lisa Vickers, Bauer Family High School Voice Studio Manager

Dr. Kiana Day Williams, Associate Director of School & Educator Engagement

FINANCE AND ADMINISTRATION

Christian Davis, Human Resources Generalist

Ariel Ehrman, Business Intelligence Manager

Denise Fruge, Accounts Payable Administrator *

Matt Gonzales, Manager of Information Technology *

Vicky Hernandez, Business Intelligence Coordinator

Chasity Hopkins, Accounting Manager

Ty Jones, Network Administrator

Elia Medina, Payroll Administrator

Noorwali Punjwani, Controller

Denise Simon, Human Resources Coordinator *

Chaedron Wright, IT Support Specialist

PHILANTHROPY

Alex de Aguiar Reuter, A ssociate Director of Philanthropy

Lyanne Alvarado, Philanthropy Officer, Corporate Partnerships

Sarah Bertrand, Philanthropy Officer

Kelly Finn, Director of Institutional Giving *

Ross Griffey, Philanthropy Writer and Data Specialist

Deborah Hirsch, Deputy Chief Philanthropy Officer *

David Krohn, Director of Philanthropy *

Tessa Larson, Philanthropy Officer

Sarah Long, Associate Director of Philanthropy

Patrick Long-Quian, Philanthropy Operations Coordinator

Catie Lovett, Donor Event Specialist

Meredith Morse, Operations Manager, Institutional Giving

Amanda Neiter, Director of Legacy Giving

Allison Reeves, Associate Director of Special Events

Brooke Rogers, Director of Special Events

Madeline Sebastian, A ssociate Director of Philanthropy

Tyler Thormählen, Philanthropy Associate

PRODUCTION AND OPERATIONS

Kaleb Abide, Costume Coordinator

Philip Alfano, Lighting Associate & Principal Draftsman *

Brian August, Stage Manager

Bruno Baker, Assistant Director

Kristen E. Burke, Director of Production*

April Cagle, Wardrobe Supervisor

Michael James Clark, Head of Lighting & Production Media *

Andrew Cloud, Properties Associate *

Rick Combs, Associate Technical Director

Norma Cortez, Costume Director *

Drieux Dismukes, Wardrobe Supervisor

Meg Edwards, Assistant Stage Manger*

Caitlin Farley, Assistant Stage Manager

Joseph B. Farley, Production Manager

Vince Ferraro, Head Electrician *

Luis Franco, Office Services Coordinator *

Beth Goodill, Assistant Stage Manager

Bridget Green, Wig and Makeup Assistant

Jackson Halphide, Assistant Technical Director

Eduardo Hawkins, Head of Sound *

David Heckman, Costume Coordinator Assistant

John Howard, Head Carpenter*

Jennelle John-Lewis, Assistant Stage Manager

Esmeralda De Leon, Costume Coordinator *

Nara Lesser, Costume Production Assistant *

Melissa McClung, Technical and Production Administrator

Megan, Properties Design Director *

Tatyana Miller, Junior Draper

Cam Ngyuen, Costume Technician

Rovion Reed, Production & Projects Manager

Bradley Roast, Technical Director

Colter Schoenfish, Assistant Director

Ian Silverman, Assistant Director

Kaley Karis Smith, Assistant Director

Rachel Smith, Assistant Head Electrician and Board Operator

Meghan Spear, Assistant Stage Manager

Dotti Staker, Wig and Makeup Department Head *

Christopher Staub, Director of Operations & Institutional Projects *

Bryan Stinnet, Assistant Carpenter/Head Flyperson

Paully Tran, Senior First Hand *

Myrna Vallejo, Costume Shop Supervisor *

Sean Waldron, Head of Props*

Annie Wheeler, Production Stage Manager *

*denotes 10 or more years of service

TICKETS START AT $25 / HGO.ORG