Texas Medical Center Orchestra Prescribes Music for the Heart and Mind

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The Texas Medical Center Orchestra was heating up at its usual Wednesday rehearsal. Literally. On a surprisingly muggy January day, despite the previous week’s rehearsal getting canceled by Winter Storm Enzo, many of the players broke a sweat in their white lab coats. Every door at the Merfish Teen Center was open to try and capture an elusive Houston breeze, spilling music out into the Meyerland night.

Don Juan, specifically. A tone poem by modernist master Richard Strauss, a famously difficult and, uh, virile piece composed when he was only 24. The song is a sonic emotional dual between the conquests of the legendary Lothario and his profound melancholy at never finding true love.

TMCO founder and conductor Libi Lebel is determined to get the right emotional tone from her orchestra. Diminutive and dressed in typical conductor black, her enthusiasm shines through in her face and instructions, delivered in a broad New York accent. During the soaring romantic passages, she appears to swim through a sea of music, her eyes fixated on a scene no one else can see. When it comes time for the bass-driven triplets that signify Don Juan’s wild mood swings, she stabs her baton like a fencing foil, stomping her foot with the rhythm so hard it almost topples her music stand.

Read more: https://www.houstoniamag.com/arts-and-culture/2025/02/texas-medical-center-orchestra

Texas Medical Center Orchestra Named National Finalist: The American Prize in Orchestral Performance (community division), 2024

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The Texas Medical Center Orchestra has been named a National Finalist in The American Prize in Orchestral Performance (community divison) for 2024!

In addition, the TMCO has been selected as NATIONAL FINALISTS for The American Prize ERNST BACON MEMORIAL AWARD for the PERFORMANCE of AMERICAN MUSIC, community ensemble division, 2024!

The American Prize National Nonprofit Competitions in the Performing Arts is the nation's most comprehensive series of contests in the performing arts. The American Prize is unique in scope and structure, designed to recognize and reward the best performing artists, directors, ensembles and composers in the United States at professional, college/university, community and high school levels, based on submitted recordings. Now in its fourteenth year, The American Prize was founded in 2010 and is awarded annually in many areas of the performing arts. Thousands of artists from all fifty states have derived benefit from their participation in the contests of The American Prize, representing literally hundreds of communities and arts organizations across the nation.

Learn more: https://theamericanprize.blogspot.com/?m=1