The South/music: MoreThan Just Pickin’

The classical performing arts in the South are not yet a match for the best the North has to offer. Southerners nonetheless have been doing nobly to prove that there is more to their culture than just pickin’. Cities like Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Louisville, Miami and New Orleans have supported and enjoyed orchestras highly regarded all over the country. The South’s most significant musical growth stems from the role it has played in the regional-opera boom now sweeping the U.S.

The Dallas Civic Opera, a kind of tumbleweed La Fenice, since the late 1950s has been the place where Americans first saw such stars as Joan Sutherland, Jon Vickers and Placido Domingo in opera. Vickers returns to help open the season Nov. 5 in the rarely heard Samson by Handel. The up-and-coming Greater Miami Opera Association does not hit its stride until the sun seekers’ stampede from the Northeast begins, but in its emphasis on big names and traditional works, it sometimes outdoes Dallas. Miami will open with Cesare Siepi in Boris Godunov (Jan. 17). Later on it will feature Sherrill Milnes in Macbeth (March 7), Carole Neblett, along with Domingo, in La Fanciulla del West. In Jackson, Miss., the all-black company Opera/South gives young singers the chance to be heard in standard works (The Flying Dutchman, Elixir of Love). Black composers get their day too. On Nov. 20 Ulysses Kay’s new opera Jubilee will be introduced.

The top performing-arts company in the South is incontestably the Houston Grand Opera (TIME, July 19). In his four-year reign, young General Director David Gockley, 33, has turned the company into one of the seven best in the U.S. The forthcoming season opens with Rigoletto (Oct. 15) but includes such attractions as Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes (Jan. 28) and Monteverdi’s The Coronation of Poppea (March 25). Gockley’s innovations include the creation of the touring Texas Opera Theater, which has successfully made a home in Texas and five nearby states; next month, for instance, Sousa’s saucy operetta El Capitan again takes to the road. Gockley is perhaps most proud of the two Houston shows that reached Broadway: Scott Joplin’s Treemonisha last fall and Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess this week. “Why can’t grand opera produce something like Kiss Me, Kate”? he asks. If anyone is going to come up with the answer some day, it could well be Houston’s Gockley.