The Premiere League

A champion of contemporary American opera, Patrick Summers has overseen  the creation of more than 50 new commissions during his 25-plus years as HGO’s Artistic and Music Director. He often served as a creative consultant, helping to foster collaboration between composers and librettists and conducting 11 of these operas himself in their world premieres. As Maestro Summers prepares to become the company’s Music Director Emeritus at the end of the 2025-26 season, trace his HGO history through these works.

This adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s novel was a vehicle for mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, who played a wrongly convicted woman exiled to Siberia. Reviewing Maestro Summers’s recording, the Houston Chronicle praised the HGO Orchestra for a “performance that sounds great and paints the shifting emotions effortlessly.”

A mentor of Maestro Summers, Floyd helped co-found HGO’s Butler Studio. His fourth HGO commission, after the novel by Olive Ann Burns, starred soprano Patricia Racette as a woman whose marriage to an older man scandalizes a small Georgia town.

This children’s opera was based on Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s fable of a pint-sized monarch’s interplanetary travels. The Chronicle lauded Summers’s reading of the Oscar-winning composer’s score as “excellent top to bottom.”

The first of six HGO world premieres by Heggie was inspired by novelist Graham Greene’s tale of illicit love in post-WWII Britain. Maestro Summers referred to the composer—whose 2000 Dead Man Walking he premiered at San Francisco Opera—as “a melodist of sweep and depth.”

The libretto for this staged oratorio was compiled from the oral histories of Houston immigrants. In a review of Maestro Summers’s recording, Gramophone magazine highlighted the score’s “soaring vocal lines, vivid orchestral shadings, and rousing choral writing.”

This chamber opera, inspired by a Terrence McNally play, premiered under the title Last Acts. In addition to conducting, Maestro Summers joined the ensemble on piano to accompany mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade, who played a Broadway diva attempting to reconnect with her estranged children.

Previn’s second opera was based on the 1945 film about a railway-station romance. A Classics Today critic, reviewing Maestro Summers’s recording, wrote that he couldn’t “imagine a better, more committed performance.” Summers also collaborated with Previn on his earlier operatic version of A Streetcar Named Desire.

Floyd’s last major work before his death in 2021—a fictionalized retelling of the life of Edward Kynaston, a 17th-century actor known for his crossdressing roles—was dubbed “compelling” by NewYork Classical Review.

Heggie’s fourth HGO commission brought to musical life the beloved 1946 holiday movie. Classical Net, covering the recording, praised Summers for “effectively catching the many sides of Heggie’s kaleidoscopic score with a masterful hand."

A dramatization of the life of Mozart’s favorite librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte, this opera starring bass-baritone Luca Pisaroni and his father-in-law, baritone Thomas Hampson, was described as “a sublime new experience” by Houstonia magazine.

The first opera by HGO’s composer-in-residence, adapted from Ezra Jack Keats’s picture book about a little boy’s snow-day adventures, was called “a charming musical winter’s tale” by Texas Classical Review.