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Celebration is on the menu at the Houston Symphony Orchestra’s season opening weekend of concerts, conducted by Juraj Valčuha. 

The pianist impressed but the soprano proved less than ideally suited to some of the selections in a wide-ranging recital program that included Rachmaninov, Strauss, standards and spirituals.

The American soprano heads an uneven cast in Michael Mayer’s archeologically inspired staging of Verdi’s great tale of love, war and betrayal.

Deborah Colker directs an ambitious show, which works incredibly well with storytelling as emotive as it is narrative, confronting death and loss in sharp, weary pains. 

Carrie Cracknell’s modernized take on Bizet’s 1875 iconic opera moves the action from early 19th-century Spain to a 21st-century American industrial town.