Previews: UNVEILING at The Hobby Center

Grammy Award-winning soprano Ana María Martínez, with Broadway music director and conductor Andy Einhorn, will be at The Hobby Center this Saturday at 7:30 pm in the Zilkha Hall. This event is launching the Hobby Center’s recently launched Houston Is Inspired initiative. Probably the coolest thing about Ana María Martínez is that she is from right here in H-Town; she is a Houston native. She is a huge force in the opera world and an internationally renowned soprano. She’s done all the leading ladies of all of anybody’s favorite operas! She will be joined by renowned conductor and music director Andy Einhorn who just recently was the music supervisor for the Broadway revival of Gypsy starring Audra McDonald. This is a rare chance to see two international music stars in one of Houston’s best intimate spaces in the Hobby Center. 

The performance is titled Unveiling and will be a combination of music and storytelling. They will concentrate on Ana’s journey to becoming one of the world’s foremost opera singers. She was raised in a household that held Cuban and Puerto Rican traditions, and went to Juilliard before launching a storied career. She is known for her stunning portrayals of the title roles of Rusalka, Carmen, and Florencia in Florencia en el Amazonas, as well as Mimi in La bohème, Cio-Cio-San in Madama Butterfly, Elisabetta in Don Carlo, Donna Elvira in Don Giovanni, Fiordiligi and Despina in Cosi fan Tutte, Tatyana in Eugene Onegin, Nedda in Pagliacci, Liù in Turandot, Marguerite in Faust, Alice Ford in Falstaff, Desdemona in Otello, and Amelia in Simon Boccanegra, among countless others. These roles have taken her to The Metropolitan Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Houston Grand Opera, Los Angeles Opera, San Francisco Opera, Washington National Opera, Opera de Puerto Rico, and Santa Fe Opera, as well as to Opera National de Paris, Royal Opera House Covent Garden, Vienna Staatsoper, Bayerische Staatsoper, The Dutch National Opera, Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires, and the Glyndebourne Festival. In addition to opera, concert and recital performances, she engages in such diverse opportunities as voicing the role of opera singer Alessandra in season three of Amazon’s Mozart in the Jungle, to performing in tribute to operatic legend Justino Díaz at the 44th Annual Kennedy Center Honors (CBS), to proudly representing her birthplace of Puerto Rico as an honoree and performer in the 62nd Annual Puerto Rican Day Parade in New York City. She is the winner of the 15th Annual OPERA NEWS Awards, and in 2021 was a recipient of Houston Mayer Sylvester Turner’s Hispanic Heritage Awards in the Arts, and was named one of Houston’s “50 Most Influential Women of 2020-2021” by Houston Woman Magazine. Ms. Martínez is equally recognized off-stage for being a leader in the performing arts industry as an advocate and educator to the next generation of musicians, and as such was Houston Grand Opera’s first-ever Artistic Advisor, a position she served in for five years, and is a tenured Professor of Voice at the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University.

Accompanying Ana is, of course, Andy Einhorn. Andy also has ties to Rice University as a graduate, and he is known for his musical direction of Broadway shows and cable series. He has forged a close personal relationship with Audra McDonald as her musical director since 2011, helping her to produce two albums as well as her most recent Broadway hit. He also did the musical direction for Bette Midler when she did Hello Dolly.