Author: Theodore Bale

  • Have You Been Too Busy to Think About Your Life?

    Have You Been Too Busy to Think About Your Life?

    In the past weeks, on either side of Bissonnet Street in Houston’s museum district, there’s been a striking contrast in human presence and absence. The joyous Stan VanDerBeek retrospective at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, co-curated by Bill Arning and João Ribas, is full of images of people. The Charles LeDray show at the Museum of…

  • Preliminary data, first experiments

    Preliminary data, first experiments

    Now mostly settled in their stellar downtown Dance Center on Preston Street, on Sunday evening artists of Houston Ballet gave a private showing of their Choreographic Workshop 2011 in the Margaret Alkek Williams Dance Lab. This isn’t a laboratory per se, but what looks more like a black-box theater to the average eye. The “preliminary data” from these…

  • Language taxed by war: Gittoes, Glass and Ginsberg

    Language taxed by war: Gittoes, Glass and Ginsberg

    “Now and then, from the deep, hidden river of life, great spirits in human form are thrown up,” Henry Miller wrote in 1956.  “Like semaphores in the night they warn of danger ahead,” he continues. The phrase is from The Time of Assassins and refers to the French poet Arthur Rimbaud. On a hot Sunday afternoon…

  • The Appealing Vulnerability of Daniel Adame

    The Appealing Vulnerability of Daniel Adame

    When I moved to Houston, I had to learn about the plants. I understood nothing of the humid sub-tropical environment or the strange soil. After several failed attempts in the dense clay of my patio garden, I turned to Equisetum hyemale, or “horsetail” reeds, which seem now to be thriving. I like watching things grow, and these reeds spread…

  • One Tibetan Thing, Reproduced

    One Tibetan Thing, Reproduced

    Seven years ago in Toronto, at a Kalachakra initiation given by H.H. The 14th Dalai Lama, I saw secular Tibetan dancing for the first time. Of course, I saw much “devotional” dancing there as well, if that’s the right term.   The preparations for this important Buddhist ritual require at least a week of effort from hundreds…

  • Dallas After Callas

    Dallas After Callas

    It was early December 1957, only a few days after the legendary Maria Callas made her Dallas debut. TIME magazine reported, “As of today, Dallas is on the map as an opera town along with New York, San Francisco and Chicago.”  I wonder, though, if today any of those cities could hold a candle to…

  • à la recherche d’une musique perdue

    à la recherche d’une musique perdue

    Every so often, a pianist comes along who changes my life. This happened in D.C., when I listened to Peter Serkin juxtapose Beethoven and Stefan Wolpe. It happened one night in a faded Victorian living room in Hartford, when Edmund Niemann played John Adams’ Phrygian Gates, only a few years after the piece had premiered in San Francisco. It…

  • Watching Tone Poems in Houston

    Watching Tone Poems in Houston

    Before moving to Houston, “Sound and Vision” suggested to me David Bowie’s flashy 1990 tour, the name taken from one of my favorite tracks on his legendary Low. But now the phrase reminds me more of Houston Symphony, with its ongoing “Sound Plus Vision” series. During the 24 years that I lived in Boston, I don’t…

  • Chanter, You Stay

    Chanter, You Stay

    He says his music continues an American tradition “exemplified by artists such as Charles Ives and Bob Dylan.” I could hear influences of both in a seven-minute excerpt from his latest opera, Voir Dire, on a libretto by Jason Zencka. Friday, I predicted that Matthew Peterson would win this year’s Opera Vista Festival. Saturday, it…

  • Tonight: Opera Vista Festival Finals

    It seemed inevitable that my love of television “reality” competitions would cross with my fascination in opera, but I had no idea this would happen in Texas. If you want to know what’s going on in contemporary opera today (and I mean that literally), you need to be here in Houston. The thrilling Opera Vista…