HOUSTON, TX (March 14, 2023) —Grammy Award winning trumpeter, composer, and POPS fan favorite Chris Botti returns to the Jones Hall stage to join Principal POPS Conductor Steven Reineke and the Houston Symphony for three special performances April 14-16. Botti and the Symphony conjure a passionate ambience with enthralling and romantic pieces such as Hallelujah and You Don’t Know What Love Is from Keep ‘Em Flying, When I Fall in Love from One Minute to Zero, and many more. Fans will have the opportunity to livestream the performance on Saturday, April 15 at 8 p.m. This performance is part of the Bank of America POPS Series.
Over three decades, Chris Botti has amassed an impressive variety of honors, including four #1 jazz albums, multiple Gold and Platinum albums and the 2013 Grammy Award for Best Pop Instrumental Album for Impressions (2012). Botti has recorded and performed with the best in music, including legends such as Sting, Barbra Streisand, Lady Gaga, Tony Bennett, Joni Mitchell, Yo-Yo Ma, Frank Sinatra, Paul Simon, and Andrea Bocelli. Performing worldwide and selling more than four million albums, Botti has become the largest-selling instrumental artist in the nation and has thoroughly established himself as one of most innovative figures of the contemporary music world.
Guests can enjoy a Chris Botti themed cocktail, The Chris Botti Rickey made with gin, lime and club soda, in the Jones Hall lobby. For tickets and more information, call 713.224.7575 or visit houstonsymphony.org/chrisbotti.
HOUSTON SYMPHONY PRESENTS CHRIS BOTTI
Friday & Saturday, April 14 & 15 at 8 p.m.
Livestream available Saturday, April 15 at 8 p.m.
Sunday, April 16 at 2:30 p.m.
Jones Hall for the Performing Arts
Steven Reineke, conductor
Chris Botti, trumpet
About Steven Reineke
Steven Reineke has established himself as one of North America’s leading conductors of popular music and is in his second decade as Music Director of The New York Pops at Carnegie Hall. Additionally, he is Principal Pops Conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and Principal Pops Conductor of the Houston and Toronto Symphony Orchestras.
Reineke is a frequent guest conductor with The Philadelphia Orchestra and his extensive North American conducting appearances include Dallas, Detroit and the Ravinia Music Festival.
On stage, Mr. Reineke has created programs and collaborated with a range of leading artists from the worlds hip hop, R & B, Broadway, television and rock including: Maxwell, Common, Kendrick Lamar, Nas, Ne-Yo, Cynthia Erivo, Ben Rector, Cody Fry, Sutton Foster, Megan Hilty, Cheyenne Jackson, Wayne Brady, Peter Frampton and Ben Folds, amongst others. In 2017 he was featured on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered leading the National Symphony Orchestra – in a first for the show’s 45-year history – performing live music excerpts in between news segments. In 2018 Reineke led the National Symphony Orchestra with hip hop legend Nas performing his seminal album Illmatic on PBS’s Great Performances.
As the creator of more than one hundred orchestral arrangements for the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra, Mr. Reineke’s work has been performed worldwide, and can be heard on numerous Cincinnati Pops Orchestra recordings on the Telarc label. His symphonic works Celebration Fanfare, Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Casey at the Bat are performed frequently in North America, including performances by the New York Philharmonic and Los Angeles Philharmonic. His Sun Valley Festival Fanfare was used to commemorate the Sun Valley Summer Symphony’s pavilion, and his Festival Te Deum and Swan’s Island Sojourn were debuted by the Cincinnati Symphony and Cincinnati Pops Orchestras. His numerous wind ensemble compositions are published by the C.L. Barnhouse Company and are performed by concert bands worldwide.
A native of Ohio, Mr. Reineke is a graduate of Miami University of Ohio (2020 Alumnus Distinguished Achievement Medal), where he earned Bachelor of Music degrees with honors in both trumpet performance and music composition. He currently resides in New York City with his husband Eric Gabbard.
About Chris Botti
Since the release of his 2004 critically acclaimed CD, When I Fall in Love, Chris Botti has become the largest-selling American instrumental artist. His success has crossed over to audiences usually reserved for pop music, and his ongoing association with PBS has led to four No. 1 jazz albums, as well as multiple Gold, Platinum and Grammy Awards. Most recently, his latest album Impressions won the Grammy for Best Pop Instrumental. Performing worldwide and selling more than four-million albums, he has found a form of creative expression that begins in jazz and expands beyond the limits of any single genre.
Over the past three decades, Chris has recorded and performed with the best in music, including Sting, Barbra Streisand, Tony Bennett, Lady Gaga, Josh Groban, Yo-Yo Ma, Michael Bublé, Paul Simon, Joni Mitchell, John Mayer, Andrea Bocelli, Joshua Bell, Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler, and even Frank Sinatra. Hitting the road for as many as 300 days per year, the trumpeter has also performed with many of the finest symphony orchestras and at some of the world’s most prestigious venues from Carnegie Hall and the Hollywood Bowl to the Sydney Opera House and the Real Teatro di San Carlo in Italy.
Impressions, Chris’s 2012 Columbia Records and Grammy-winning release, is the latest in a stellar parade of albums—including When I Fall in Love (2004), To Love Again: The Duets (2005), Italia (2007) and the CD/DVD Chris Botti in Boston (2009)—that has firmly established him as a clarion voice in the American contemporary music scene. Playing with his uniquely expressive sound and soaring musical imagination, Chris is joined on the disc by featured artists Andrea Bocelli, Vince Gill, Herbie Hancock, Mark Knopfler and David Foster in a warm, intimate celebration of melodic balladry. With Impressions and the albums that preceded it, Chris Botti has thoroughly established himself as one of the important, innovative figures of the contemporary music world.
About Houston Symphony
For Juraj Valčuha’s inaugural season as Music Director, the Houston Symphony continues its second century as one of America’s leading orchestras with a full complement of concert, community, education, touring, and recording activities. One of the oldest performing arts organizations in Texas, the Symphony held its inaugural performance at The Majestic Theater in downtown Houston on June 21, 1913. Today, with an operating budget of $34.325 million (FY23), the full-time ensemble of professional musicians presents more than 130 concerts annually, making it the largest performing arts organization in Houston. Traditionally, musicians of the orchestra and the Symphony’s two Community-Embedded Musicians also offer over 1,000 community-based performances each year at various schools, community centers, hospitals, and churches reaching more than 200,000 people in Greater Houston annually.
After suspending concert activities in March 2020 and cancelling the remainder of 2019–20 events due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Symphony resumed activities in May 2020, opening the 2020–21 Season on schedule in September 2020. The Symphony successfully completed a full 2020–21 season with in-person audiences and weekly livestreams of each performance, making it one of the only orchestras in the world to do so, while the Symphony’s Education and Community Engagement team continued to fulfill its mission through creative and virtual means throughout the COVID pandemic.
The Grammy Award-winning Houston Symphony has recorded under various prestigious labels, including Koch International Classics, Naxos, RCA Red Seal, Telarc, Virgin Classics, and, most recently, Dutch recording label Pentatone. In 2017, the Houston Symphony was awarded an ECHO Klassik award for the live recording of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck under the direction of former Music Director Hans Graf. The orchestra earned its first Grammy nomination and Grammy Award at the 60th annual ceremony for the same recording in the Best Opera Recording category.