This year Rienzi continues its collaboration with the Houston Grand Opera Studio. Each year, four musical programs are performed in Rienzi’s intimate Gallery by up-and-coming opera performers. This Friday and Saturday, September 30th and October 1st, begins the 2011-2012 recital schedule. Among the selections for this weekend, HGO Studio will be performing A Whitman Service, by Lee Hoiby who has brought several of Walt Whitman poems into the world of music and...

Every morning at Rienzi, I make a trek (or several…) from the kitchen to the Education office with a rather large cup of coffee (half and half, no sugar). On my way, I tend to cut through the Living Room bar, passing a display of beautiful pink and orange gilded porcelain – but as beautiful as it is, I don’t often stop to look at it. That is, until I read through the October selection...

In preparing for English Taste, we spent considerable time at the dining tables of eighteenth-century England, but on the way stopped into the annals of twenty-first century technology.  For its very first exhibition, Rienzi is offering an audio tour by use of individual MP3 players. Visitors are invited to listen to a series of voice recordings featuring discussion on historic dining, including eighteenth-century etiquette, decorative motifs, and authentic period recipes. This is a big development...

This is our second week hosting English Taste – the grandest eighteenth-century dinner party in Houston – and now that the rush of opening has subsided, we are ready to celebrate in the appropriate fashion. If you join us at this Thursday’s punch party, you will share in a delightful cup of history, and to that end, here is a bit more on the tale of English punch:   The popularity of alcoholic punch in...

 In lieu of our upcoming Punch Party (September 29th, buy your tickets now!), I am reviving some notes on a Gallery Talk I held last October, on a curious item from Rienzi’s collection – a punch pot, from 1765, by the Worcester Porcelain Manufactory[i] :   Alcoholic punch was consumed throughout the eighteenth century, however, the punch pot – a form resembling an overblown teapot – appeared in England only at about 1750, falling out of...