Company Foundation
The HGO Association has 166 members: a 34-member Board of Directors, chaired by Beth Madison, as of August 1, 2011, one honorary director, and 131 Trustees. The Board of Directors meets four times, and the Trustees meet three times each year. The opera employs over 1,000 people annually, 120 of whom are full-time staff. On May 25, 2011, the Board of Directors appointed Patrick Summers as Artistic and Music Director, occupying the Margaret Alkek Williams Chair. At the same time, Perryn Leech was named Managing Director. They succeed Anthony Freud, OBE, the company's General Director from 2005–2011, who resigned at the end of the 2010–11 season to assume leadership of Lyric Opera of Chicago.
The permanent artistic foundation of HGO rests on three pillars: the HGO Orchestra, HGO Chorus and HGO Studio. During Patrick Summers’ thirteen years with the company, the HGO Orchestra has reached a new level of virtuosity, adding many great masterworks to its repertoire. The HGO Chorus, which was created at the same time as HGO itself in 1955, has become one of the world's most acclaimed opera choruses under the direction of Chorus Master Richard Bado.
HGO's 2011–2012 season consists of 31 performances of six mainstage productions: The Barber of Seville, Fidelio, La traviata, The Rape of Lucretia, Don Carlos and Mary Stuart.
Read more about this topic: Houston Grand Opera
Famous quotes containing the words company and/or foundation:
“All I can tell you with certainty is that I, for one, have no self, and that I am unwilling or unable to perpetrate upon myself the joke of a self.... What I have instead is a variety of impersonations I can do, and not only of myself—a troupe of players that I have internalised, a permanent company of actors that I can call upon when a self is required.... I am a theater and nothing more than a theater.”
—Philip Roth (b. 1933)
“Surrealism is not a school of poetry but a movement of liberation.... A way of rediscovering the language of innocence, a renewal of the primordial pact, poetry is the basic text, the foundation of the human order. Surrealism is revolutionary because it is a return to the beginning of all beginnings.”
—Octavio Paz (b. 1914)