The Dunlavy’s chandelier-bedecked space and bayou views provide a recipe for instant urban-glam. But Jacqueline Soussan and Aaron Almquist enlisted Pomp & Circumstance to infuse the venue with a hint of rustic romance for their September 2017 nuptials. Bronze and gold accents shimmered in the glass-encased room and on the wood-clad deck, offset by bright white arrangements courtesy of Flora & Eventi. Other warm touches included gold-calligraphied table numbers, a kids zone, complete with crayons and a coloring sheet, and comfort-food bites like donut holes. With their adorable, tux-clad infant son by their side for much of the night, which took place just three weeks after Hurricane Harvey, the Almquists toasted to new beginnings.
HOW DID YOUR team form? After ten years as a realtor for a top firm in Houston, Kim Perdomo established a boutique brokerage in 2011. The team grew organically and joined forces with Compass in 2019.
What is the relationship within the team? We have a very special relationship as a team. A lot of us have been friends for many years prior to working together in real estate. With that brings a camaraderie and loyalty to one another that is truly remarkable. We all work together to help everyone succeed, and that is a huge benefit to our clients.
What makes you unique? Our Brand Promise:
Maintaining Lifelong Relationships With Our Clients
Personal Service
Distinctive Marketing
Helping Our Clients Make the Right Move
How do you bring this promise to life? We specialize in presenting our listings to the market to achieve the best results. Our personalized, hands-on service includes coordinating staging services, repairs, inspections and through distinctive marketing we attract the largest group of buyers. A few metrics we use to define best results include sales price, contract terms offered, days on market and list price to sales price ratios. Since we are with our clients throughout the entire process, our business relationships typically evolve into true friendships. We have done this successfully in a seller’s market and buyer’s market. As a team, we have 140 years of experience. We have seen it all.
What’s the secret to your success? Integrity. Doing what we say we are going to do and putting our clients’ needs above ours.
What’s next for the end of the year and 2023? We just returned from our top producer awards trip in Alys Beach, Fla., and we are beginning to set goals and prioritize on how we can continue to raise the bar as individuals and as a team. We are currently working with clients to help them evaluate their real estate needs and monitoring the luxury market while communicating exclusive listing opportunities to our buyer clients and fellow agents. Our team expertise and the Compass advantage provides the ultimate results for our clients.
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THIS WEEKEND, EXPERIENCE the “astrological persona” of each planet in our tiny solar system when the Houston Symphony presents Gustav Holst’s popular orchestral suite The Planets, with the Women of the Houston Symphony Chorus providing spectral vocals for the suite’s final movement, “Neptune, the Mystic.”
You can congratulate your listening skills if, upon hearing The Planets’ powerful, opening movement, “Mars, the Bringer of War,” you catch yourself thinking, “Man, that reminds me of Darth Vader.” While The Planets has certainly been mined by John Williams and many other fine film composers, hearing it on its own is a transcendental experience. New Zealand-born Gemma New conducts, and guest Camille Thomas is the soloist in Edward Elgar’s Cello Concerto.
Also on the program is Die Windsbraut (“The Bride of the Wind”), a sweeping orchestral work by the Russian-born British composer Alissa Firsova. New conducted Die Windsbraut in Manchester in May, and was so taken by the piece, she brought it to the attention of the Houston Symphony.
It was inspired by the expressionist painting of the same name by Oskar Kokoschka, which portrays the artist lying awake next a sleeping Alma Mahler. “I find her very intriguing,” says Firsova of Alma, whose biography is titled Malevolent Muse. “Even though she was a very difficult, and sometimes hugely unpleasant person. She was also a very talented composer. Who knows what would have happened if she had been allowed to continue to compose?”
Kokoschka painted more than 100 works inspired by Alma, and hoped that one day, a poet would “transcribe their love into music” to show the world how deeply they loved each other. “When I read those words, I thought, ‘This is a challenge for me,’” says Firsova, who resolved to fulfill Kokoschka’s wish with music.
Firsova, 36, is the daughter of two highly revered composers, Elena Firsova and Dmitri Smirnov, who were both successful in their home country but were blacklisted by the Union of Soviet Composers, an organization created in 1932 by Joseph Stalin.
In 1991, the parents told Firsova and her brother to pack their favorite things for a trip, and the family fled to the safety of England. “I really felt growing up in England was like growing up in a paradise,” says Firsova.
Sadly, Firsova’s father died of Covid-19 in April 2020. “I still feel so much how he is still alive,” say Firsova, “because of all the love that he gave us and his enthusiasm for life.” Firsova still plays her father’s music, and his works continue to be performed across the globe.
Gemma New (photo by Roy Cox)
'Bride of the Wind,' by Oskar Kokoschka, 1913
While this weekend’s concerts are first and foremost about music and the stimulating interplay between contemporary and classical styles, it would be naive to say such programming has come together without a reckoning in classical music in the wake of the pandemic, the #MeToo movement, and Black Lives Matters protests.
Today, among the 25 largest American orchestras, there is only one female music director. In interviews, New, who was recently appointed the first female principal conductor of the 75-year-old New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, is reluctant to discuss the gender disparities in classical music, preferring instead to let her skill and passion for conducting and inventive programming speak for itself.
Meanwhile, the Houston Symphony has always included women in its orchestra, going as far back as 1931, when violinist Josephine Boudreaux made her debut as concert master with the symphony. If progress still feels slow, it’s encouraging to consider the Houston Symphony’s history of inclusivity, and the potential that exists thanks to pressure on arts organizations by a new generation of listeners and musicians.
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Now in its 42nd season, the Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series is still going strong, bringing award-winning writers from around the world to Houston to read from their work and engage in a lively, onstage discussion with Texas-based authors, journalists, and poets.
On Monday, Nov. 14, at Rice University’s Brockman Hall for Opera, the series brings U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo to the stage for a reading and discussion with Texas Poet Laureate Lupe Mendez, who was born in Jalisco, Mexico, in 1976, grew up in Galveston, and is one of the Houston’s best known poets and activists. (Mendez is one of several poets featured in our 2017 article about Houston’s thriving poetry scene.) Harjo, who lives in Tulsa, is a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation and is the first Native American to hold the position of U.S. Poet Laureate.
It’s a logical and inspired pairing, as Texas culture is so strongly rooted in that of indigenous tribes who have lived on the land going back thousands of years ago and on up to the present day. Harjo’s writing connects back to the legacies of her ancestors and displacement, drawing inspiration from Navajo horse songs and the rhythms of jazz, and is described by author Sandra Cisneros as “light and elixir, the very best prescription for us in wounded times.” She is the author of nine books of poetry, several plays and children’s books, and two memoirs. And if that weren’t enough, Harjo is also a talented performer, who also plays saxophone and has released seven albums of original music. Her new book, titled Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light, is an annotated compilation of poems written over the past 50 years, addressing such profound life events everyone can identify with, such as losing a parent, becoming a mother, and falling in love.
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