Houston Symphony to tackle ‘Everests’ of classical repertoire in new season
The Houston Symphony’s 2023-24 season — announced Tuesday — finds the orchestra tackling several “Everests” of the symphonic repertoire, according to executive director and CEO John Mangum. Mangum credits Juraj Valçuha, entering his second season as the orchestra’s music director, with meticulously preparing the orchestra to scale such great heights.
“He’s really digging in the way that they rehearse together,” Mangum says. “Each week builds upon the previous week so that this work together has a trajectory, a direction, and the end goal is getting the orchestra to play at the absolute highest level. I think that a lot of the repertoire that’s been chosen for the coming season has that in mind.”
As with the current season, the 2023-24 season is structured around three thematically linked “mini-festivals” spanning two successive weekends apiece. Interestingly enough, the first two weekends don’t count — but, considering the programs’ decidedly French tilt, it’s close. The season opens Sept. 29 with Francis Poulenc’s “Gloria,” featuring soprano
Erin Morley and the Houston Symphony Chorus, plus Messiaen’s “Les offrandes oubliées (Forgotten Offerings)" and Ravel’s “Daphnis et Chloë.”
The next weekend, recent International Chopin Piano Competition winner Seong-Jin Cho — who appears in recital April 14 at Galveston’s the Grand 1894 Opera House — makes his Houston Symphony debut with Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand, on a concert also featuring Hector Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique” and contemporary French-American composer Betsy Jolas’ “A Little Summer Suite.”
The first actual mini-festival arrives with November’s celebration of symphonic dances composed expressly for the concert stage (as opposed to the ballet). Repertoire includes Rachmaninoff ’s “Symphonic Dances”; Bartok’s “Dance Suite”; Ravel’s “La Valse”; Gabriela Ortiz’s Kauyumari, based on the Mexican legend of the Blue Deer; soloist Jean-Yves Thibaudet on Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G; and the U.S. premiere of Pulitzer-winning composer Julia Wolfe’s “Pretty.”
Come January, Triumph & Tragedy heralds the next minifestival, going from the depths of Mahler’s “Tragic” Symphony No. 6 to the heights of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3, “Eroica.” The final mini-festival closes the classical season in June
2024 by putting a deep focus on the works of Richard Strauss, first with an evening of symphonic works, including “An Alpine Symphony” and the heartbreaking “Four Last Songs” (featuring acclaimed American soprano Rachel Willis Sørensen); and then through a staging of his controversial opera “Salomé,” also opening at Houston Grand Opera next month.
Similar to the orchestra’s Songs of the Earth mini-festival last month, Mangum says to expect several peripheral events peering into the life of a composer he argues was as important as Mahler and Stravinsky in influencing the direction of 20th-century music.
“We’re going to build this two weeks out to have other activities that really give us a deep dive into a fascinating composer,” Mangum explains, “one who bridges the core of the 19th century and Romanticism in his early works, and lived well into the 1940s.”
Entering his final season as the orchestra’s artistic partner, Itzhak Perlman — who will conduct Mozart’s “Requiem” this Saturday and Sunday — will return next February to conduct the “Winter” movement from Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons” and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5; and in May for a special concert of klezmer music titled “In the Fiddler’s House.” Besides guest conductors, such as Fabien Gabel, David Robertson (doing John Adams’ pandemic-postponed El Niño) and Xian Zhang, also returning will be former music directors Andrés Orozco-Estrada and Christoph Eschenbach, the latter to conduct one of his specialties, Anton Bruckner’s Symphony No. 8.
Orozco-Estrada, who ended his tenure in April 2022 with a soul-stirring performance of Mahler’s “Resurrection” symphony, will return twice, first in December to conduct Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 11 (“The Year 1905”) and in April to lead the orchestra and chorus through Carl Orff ’s “Carmina Burana.” The Shostakovich is Orozco-Estrada’s deliberate nod to the orchestra’s history, notes Mangum: former music director Leopold Stokowski conducted the U.S. premiere here in 1958, and the orchestra subsequently recorded the piece.
“I’m really excited about that because I know that’s a piece that Andrés really wanted to do during his tenure as music director,” Mangum says. “COVID sort of foiled opportunities where we could have done that before his time was finished.”
The Pops series, meanwhile, opens in September with Blockbuster Broadway featuring Norm Lewis, longtime star of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “The Phantom of the Opera,” and continues through tributes to Etta James and the Moody Blues, plus “I Will Survive — Diva Legends” and the 100th anniversary of George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” the latter featuring jazz pianist Marcus Roberts and his trio. The Pops season closes next May with a program of music from the “Star Wars” franchise in chronological order, including standalone films “Solo” and “Rogue One.”
“Really, when I think about the Pops, it celebrates some of the greatest music produced in the last hundred years, and it also allows us to connect with the broadest possible audience in our city,” Mangum says.
In all, the press release for 2023-24 sprawls well past 20 pages, also encompassing works like Mendelssohn’s “Scottish” symphony, Prokofiev’s “Romeo & Juliet” suite, Duke Ellington’s Harlem suite, Brahms’ “A German Requiem” and Respighi’s “Pines of Rome”; as well as illustrious guest artists such as Lang Lang, Emanuel Ax, Alexandra Dariescu and Augustin Hadelich; plus solo turns by Houston Symphony concertmaster Yoonshin Song and principal cellist Brinton Averil Smith. To Mangum, perhaps the only thing that can match the enormous scale of works on tap for next season is the volume of performances.
“We’re doing one, two or three new things every week,” he says. “It’s a huge amount of music that the orchestra plays in the season, and the thing that’s really miraculous is they play it all beautifully and at such a high level. That’s, I think, one of the things that really makes the Houston Symphony special.”