From theater to opera, Texas culture has moved toward virtual events.
Opera
The acclaimed opera singer Jay Hunter Morris has traveled the globe, performing Wagner, Puccini, and Bizet. And yet he still feels like a hick from Paris, Texas.
An unusual production of Handel’s English-language opera “Acis and Galatea” is the latest expression of a century-old link between the University of Texas at El Paso and the Himalayan kingdom.
One day when I was in the seventh grade at Christ the King School in Dallas, the Ursuline nun who taught our class dragged in a phonograph with 78 rpm records from the convent. She put on an album of Puccini love duets sung by Licia Albanese and James Milton.
“I play a lot of boys,” reports Susan Graham, a svelte but buxom mezzo-soprano. Schooled for opera’s mischievous “trouser” roles by climbing trees and toilet-papering houses while she grew up in Midland, the 36-year-old earned a master’s degree in music at Texas Tech University in Lubbock and went on to…
From the Paris Bastille to a duet with Pavarotti to a PBS documentary: Amarillo’s resident opera star, Mary Jane Johnson, has had a career full of high notes, and she has savored every one of them.