Ars Lyrica Houston 2017/18 season
Artful Women: Muse, Heroine, Musician, and Patron
All season subscription performances are held at Zilkha Hall, The Hobby Center for the Performing Arts: 800 Bagby Street, Houston, Texas
To purchase Subscriptions or Tickets by:
- ONLINE visit www.arslyricahouston.org
- PHONE call the Hobby Center Box Office: 713-315-2525 - Press 4 for Ars Lyrica
Sweet Philomela
Friday, September 22 at 7:30 pm
Ars Lyrica’s season opener introduces exotic musical works inspired by Philomela, a mythical princess of Athens whose transformation into a nightingale has fascinated poets and musicians for centuries. Its primary offering, Johann Adolph Hasse’s 1769 lyric cantata L’Armonica, combines the ethereal sounds of the glass harmonica with a soprano soloist and full Baroque orchestra.
Italian Sirens
Sunday, November 12 at 6 pm
The decades around 1600 saw a remarkable flowering of female musical talent, virtuoso singers especially. Italian Sirens is devoted to these unique voices, as realized in the work of three remarkable early seventeenth-century composers: Isabella Leonarda, Francesca Caccini, and Barbara Strozzi.
New Year’s in Berlin
Sunday, December 31 at 9 pm
To ring in the new year, Ars Lyrica recreates a salon chez Sara Itzig Levy in Berlin, whose home was a meeting place for literary and musical giants, including Bach’s eldest sons and the young Felix Mendelssohn, Levy’s grandnephew. This program features a C. P. E. Bach double concerto for fortepiano and harpsichord, a work closely connected with our legendary hostess: at its 1788 première, Mme. Levy herself played one of the solo parts!
Esther and Jonah
Friday, February 16 at 7:30 pm
Ars Lyrica’s 2018 Houston Early Music Festival program, offered in collaboration with Bach Society Houston, pairs two concise music dramas from opposite ends of the eighteenth century: Handel’s Esther (1718) and Samuel Felsted’s Jonah (1775). With gorgeous arias and stirring choruses in abundance, the former celebrates an Old Testament heroine’s victory over the forces of evil while the latter is the first American oratorio.
Long Live the Queen
Saturday, April 7 at 7:30 pm
In a program featuring the award-winning Moores School Concert Chorale, Ars Lyrica celebrates the musical legacy of two important royal patrons from the Baroque era with J. S. Bach’s rarely heard Trauerode, written for the funeral of Christiane Eberhardine of Saxony, and Handel’s Ode for the Birthday of Queen Anne.
A Day with Marie Antoinette
Saturday, May 19 at 7:30 pm
This special evening with France’s most famous queen includes a violin concerto by her music teacher Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, operatic excerpts from C. W. Gluck’s Orphée, and Haydn’s “Paris” Symphony No. 85, subtitled “The Queen.”
About Ars Lyrica Houston
Founded in 1998 by harpsichordist and conductor Matthew Dirst, Ars Lyrica Houston presents a diverse array of music from the 17th and 18th centuries on period instruments. Its local subscription series, according to the Houston Chronicle, “sets the agenda” for early music in Houston and it also appears regularly at major festivals and conferences, including the 2014 Berkeley Early Music Festival & Exhibition. Ars Lyrica’s distinctive programming favors Baroque dramatic and chamber works, and its pioneering efforts have won international acclaim: the ensemble’s world première recording of Johann Adolf Hasse’s Marc’Antonio e Cleopatra, hailed by Early Music America as “a thrilling performance that glows in its quieter moments and sparkles with vitality,” was nominated for a Grammy Award® for Best Opera 2011.
Ars Lyrica Founder & Artistic Director Matthew Dirst is the first American musician to win major international prizes in both organ and harpsichord, including the American Guild of Organists National Young Artist Competition (1990) and the Warsaw International Harpsichord Competition (1993). Dirst’s recordings with Ars Lyrica have earned a Grammy nomination and widespread critical acclaim. His degrees include a PhD in musicology from Stanford University and the prix de virtuosité in both organ and harpsichord from the Conservatoire National de Reuil-Malmaison, France, where he spent two years as a Fulbright scholar. Equally active as a scholar and as an organist, Dirst is Professor of Music at the Moores School of Music, University of Houston, and Organist at St Philip Presbyterian Church in Houston. He is the author of Engaging Bach: The Keyboard Legacy from Marpurg to Mendelssohn (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and the editor of Bach and the Organ (University of Illinois Press, 2016).
Music in Video: "Antonio E Cleopatra: Duetto: Bella Etade Avventurosa (Marc Antonio, Cleopatra)" by Jamie & Ava Pine, Sono Luminus
