Houston Grand Opera

[1] Its inaugural season featured two performances of two operas, Salome (starring Brenda Lewis in the title role) and Madama Butterfly.

Following Freud's departure, joint leadership was shared between Patrick Summers, who had been music director at HGO since 1998, and Perryn Leech, who joined the company in 2006 and became chief operating officer in 2010.

No music director was appointed during the Walter Herbert years (1955–72) until 1971, when longtime assistant conductor and chorus master Charles Rosekrans was named.

Studio alumni include sopranos Jan Grissom, Marquita Lister, Ana María Martínez, Edrie Means, Erie Mills, Albina Shagimuratova, Heidi Stober, Rachel Willis-Sørensen, and Tamara Wilson; mezzo-sopranos Jamie Barton, Joyce DiDonato, Denyce Graves, Susanne Mentzer, and Marietta Simpson Archived 2017-11-01 at the Wayback Machine; tenors Bruce Ford, Carroll Freeman and Norman Reinhardt; baritones Richard Paul Fink, and Scott Hendricks; bass-baritones Greer Grimsley, Ryan McKinny Archived 2018-06-28 at the Wayback Machine, and Eric Owens; and bass Eric Halfvarson.

Other alumni include HGO Chorus Master Richard Bado, composer/conductor David Hanlon, former Lyric Opera of Kansas City Artistic Director Ward Holmquist, conductor/arranger/composer James Lowe, conductor/pianist Eric Melear, conductor Evan Rogister, and conductor/pianist Craig Terry.

Participants selected for the program receive training that includes daily voice lessons and coachings as well as classes in characterization, movement, diction, and score preparation.

HGOco's first project, the ongoing Song of Houston initiative, creates new works focused on people and groups in Houston—the most culturally diverse city in the United States, according to a report of the Kinder Institute for Urban Research and the Hobby Center for the Study of Texas.

[7] In 2009, HGOco received the Leading Lights Diversity Award in Arts and Culture from the National MultiCultural Institute (NCMI) for Song of Houston.

Recent HGOco premieres include Laura Kaminsky and Mark Campbell/Kimberly Reed's Some Light Emerges, about Houston philanthropist and humanitarian Dominique de Menil and her quest to create the Rothko Chapel; Gregory Spears and Royce Vavrek's O Columbia, realized through the collaboration of Houston-based NASA astronauts, scientists, and engineers; and David Hanlon and Stephanie Fleischmann's After the Storm, about the impact that Hurricane Ike and the Great Storm of 1900 had upon Galveston and the Gulf Coast.

HGO has commissioned five works from Floyd: Bilby's Doll (1976), Willie Stark (1981), The Passion of Jonathan Wade (new version, 1991), Cold Sassy Tree (2000), and Prince of Players (2016).

Among them, the most significant are the first staged version of Handel's Rinaldo in 1975 (a concert version had been given in 1972 by the Handel Society of New York), starring Marilyn Horne in the title role and Samuel Ramey as Argante; Rossini's La donna del lago in a new critical edition in 1981, and more recently, Weinberg's The Passenger, a long-suppressed Holocaust opera composed in 1968 and performed by HGO in 2014.

Besides presenting the American premiere in Houston, HGO was also invited to bring the production to the Park Avenue Armory as part of the 2014 Lincoln Center Festival.

During the 2017–18 season, HGOco began a web-only series of 15-minute operas titled Star-Cross'd, based on true stories with a Romeo and Juliet theme.

In May 1998, Houston Grand Opera unveiled its Multimedia Modular Stage, a large steel structure with moving lights, projection screens for live-feed video and still images, and a big sound system.

The effects of the storm, along with the impact of 9/11 and the collapse of Enron just months afterward, led to the retirement of the Multimedia Modular Stage, which was costly to assemble and disassemble.

In the fall of 2000, HGO devised and implemented a system of plasma and projection screens mounted in the Grand Tier and Balcony sections of the larger of the two halls in the Wortham Theater Center.

This system—designed to provide close-up views of the action on stage and improve sightlines in the unusually steep Grand Tier and Balcony areas—was called OperaVision and received mixed appraisals from opera patrons.