Houston-Based TikTok Violinist Releases New Album — and It’s Like Nothing You’ve Heard Before

Chris Becker

SOME MUSICIANS ARE born with a gift for melody. Notes seem to stream from their fingers, creating phrases that stick in your mind’s ear, like a tune you’ve always wanted to hear, and finally have.

In an Exhibit of Compelling Self Portraits, a Photographer Explores His Complicated Origins

“WHO ARE YOUR people?” It’s a very Southern question Dallas-based photographer Hakeem Adewumi has heard since childhood, when he would visit his mother’s family in rural Texas. There, he’d see horses, cows, pigs and chickens — different sights than he and his friends usually saw in the city.

A Latin American Art Icon Turns 90 — and His Best Work Is on Display at a Houston Gallery Now

Chris Becker

THIS MONTH, COLOMBIAN artist Fernando Botero turns 90. Houston’s Art of the World Gallery is marking that milestone with Celebrating 90 Years of Botero, a museum-worthy exhibit of Botero’s paintings, sculptures and works-on-paper. The show includes pieces from the earliest decades of his career, a series of never-before-seen paintings created during the Covid-19 pandemic, and his monumental four-panel polyptych La Calle (The Street), described as “the largest oil painting ever created by the Master of Volume.” The exhibit continues through May 31.

Photo by Lynn Lane

HOUSTON GRAND OPERA’S second fall repertoire production is Gioachino Rossini’s Cinderella. The colorful, commedia dell'arte-inspired production opens Friday, Oct. 25, and stars Grammy Award-winning mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard — a breathtaking brunette beauty, even when doused in soot — in bel canto role of Angelina, known to her mean step-sisters as “Cenerentola.”

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Art + Entertainment

BRETT MILLER WAS just 10 years old when his parents took him to a screening of the 1925 silent film, The Phantom of the Opera, starring Lon Chaney as “The Phantom” of the Paris Opera House, with an accompanying soundtrack played live by an organist. The film contains one of the most famous “reveals” on celluloid (We won’t give it away!) and is all the more shocking when accompanied by live music played on the Phantom’s favorite instrument.

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