Prestigious HGO Program's New Music Director Arrives from San Francisco

Evan W. Black

ONE OF THE country’s most prestigious opera-training programs, HGO Studio has announced its next music director.

MFAH Welcomes Exclusive Items from New York's Jewish Museum, Prepares to Open Permanent Gallery

Evan W. Black

IN PARTNERSHIP WITH New York’s Jewish Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston has just unveiled a collection of “exceptional objects” called Beauty and Ritual, on view through Sept. 18.

Here’s Where to Chill Out for National Ice Cream Month

Robin Barr Sussman

OF ALL THE national food holidays, ice cream day is probably the most important if you live in sweltering Texas. President Reagan gets the credit for making it official in 1984 when he designated July as National Ice Cream Month, and the third Sunday of the month as National Ice Cream Day. Scoop up these mouthwatering specials while it’s hot!
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Couples and Spa Aficionados Are Seeking Out This Equestrian and NFL Wife’s New Hotspot

LeBrina Jackson (photo by Shamir Johnson)

LEBRINA JACKSON, A noted equestrian with a fascinating story of overcoming challenges to succeed and grow, has always been an entrepreneur with a nurturing spirit. Even as a child growing up in Fifth Ward, she sold homemade popsicles — with fruit juice frozen into Styrofoam cups — for fifty cents, to cool her customers down on hot summer days.

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This Weekend: HGO Takes on Rarely Staged — and Oft Controversial — Wagner Opera

(photo by Robert Kusel)

Parsifal

TO BE BLUNT, there’s opera, and then there’s Wagner. By the time Richard Wagner had completed Parsifal in 1882, he was using the word bühnenweihfestspiel (“festival play for the consecration of a stage”) instead of “opera” to describe this four-and-a-half-hour epic, where music, drama, lighting, architecture, and quasi-religious ritual come together to create what the Germans called “gesamtkunstwerk,” or a total work of art. In the past decade, only two U.S. opera houses have had the guts to take on Parsifal, which makes the upcoming Houston Grand Opera production even more of a must-see, given how rarely this complex and controversial opera is staged.

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