August 8, 2019 | UHCL Staff
University of Houston-Clear Lake’s Bayou Theater will open the 2019-20 season and keep a longstanding opening night tradition as Mercury will kick off another lineup of exceptional live performances with Bach and Piazzolla on Friday, Aug. 30, at 7:30 p.m.
“For me, this is a personal program,” said Mercury’s Artistic Director Antoine Plante. “This goes with the beginning of my career. Twenty years ago, I started Mercury with a classical music focus on baroque and the music of Bach, but I was also a lover of tango.”
“I loved the dance and the music of the tango, and started to perform the music, getting acquainted with the specific instruments and the style. That is when I rediscovered the music of Astor Piazzolla, the main composer of the nuevo tango style of music,” he added. “This program merges these two currents in my life in one night. We have taken the music of traditional tango and made it more modern. It’s designed for a concert experience, not just for people to dance.”
Plante said that Bach’s “Art of the Fugue” is considered one of his master works. “It’s a composition of many different fugues on the same theme. They’re super technical and mathematical. We built a program around several of these fugues and we insert many songs from Piazzolla, making a contrast of the two worlds.”
Although this music was written centuries apart, one composer in Germany and one in Argentina, Piazzolla was strongly influenced by Bach, Plante said. “Piazzolla uses many of Bach’s techniques and this is linked musically in the concert. One of the goals is to hear the music of Bach differently. There’s a great rhythm, and maybe if you didn’t hear it in the context of dance music, you would hear the Piazzolla differently. It makes for a diverse, beautiful and enjoyable concert.”
Plante said he looks forward to the opening of the Bayou Theater season every year. “We open the season for the theater, but it’s also the first performance of Mercury’s season,” he said. “This is the night when the members of the orchestra get back together after the summer. The opening of the season is a special moment for the orchestra and we have felt this way for years. We love it.”
Buy your 2019-2020 Bayou Theater season tickets online.
